HISTORICAL

STUDIES TODAY

Edited by
Felix Gilbert and
Stephen R. Graubard

W. W. Norton & Co.

New York - 1972
 Notes on Contributors

Robert Darnton, born in 1939, is assistant professor of history at

Princeton University. He is the author of Mesmerism and the End of the
Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
M. I. Finley, born in 1912, is professor of ancient history and Fellow of
Jesus College, University of Cambridge. Mr. Finley is the author of
Land and Credit in Ancient Athens (New Brunswick, 1952), The World
of Odysseus (New York, 1954), The Ancient Greeks (New York, 1963),
Aspects of Antiquity (New York, 1968), Ancient Sicily to the Arab
Conquest (New York, 1968), vol. I of a three-volume history of Sicily
with Denis Mack Smith, and Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaic
Ages (New York, 1970). He is the editor of Slavery in Classical
Antiquity (Cambridge, Eng., 1960), The Greek Historians (New York,
1958), and Josephus (New York, 1965). Fran?ois Furet, born in 1927, is
director of the Centre de Recherches of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes
Etudes, Section VI. He is the co author of Structures et relations sociales
? Paris au milieu du XVIIIe si?cle (Paris, 1961), La R?volution fran?
aise, 2 vols. (Paris, 1964 1965), and Livre et soci?t? dans la France du
XVIIIe si?cle, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1965-1970). Felix Gilbert, born in
1905, is professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. Mr. Gilbert is coauthor of
History (Princeton, 1953) and author of To the Farewell Address
(Princeton, 1961), Machiavelli and Guic ciardini (Princeton, 1965), and
The End of the European Era, 1890 to the Present (New York, 1970).
Pierre Goubert, born in 1915, is professor of early modern history at the
University of Paris (Sorbonne) and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes
Etudes, Section VI. He is the author of Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de
1600 ? 1730 (Paris, 1960), Louis XTV et 20 millions de fran?ais (Paris,
1966; New York, 1970), and L'Ancien R?gime (Paris, 1969). E. J.
Hobsbawm, born in 1917, is professor of economic and social his tory at
Birkbeck College, the University of London. He is the author of
Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1959), Age of Revolution (London,
1962), Labouring Men (London, 1964), Industry and Empire (London,
1968), Bandits (London, 1969), and, with G. Rude, Captain Swing
(London, 1969).

Jacques Le Goff, bom in 1924, is director of studies at the Ecole

Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Section VI. He is the author of Mar chands
et banquiers du Moyen Age (Paris, 1956), Les intellectuels au Moyen
Age (Paris, 1957), La civilisation de VOccident M?di?val (Paris, 1964),
and Das Hochmittelalter (Frankfurt am Main, 1965). Frank E. Manuel,
born in 1910, is Kenan Professor of Histoiy at New York University. He
is the author of The New World of Henri Saint-Simon (Cambridge,
Mass., 1956), The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge,
Mass., 1959), The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), Isaac
Newton, Historian (Cam bridge, Mass., 1963), Shapes of Philosophical
History (Stanford, 1965), and A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge,
Mass., 1968). Mr. Manuel is editor of the Daedalus Library volume on
Utopias and Utopian Thought (Boston, 1966). Benjamin I. Schwartz,
born in 1916, is professor of history and govern ment at Harvard
University. His publications include Chinese Com munism and the Rise
of Mao (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen
Fu and the West (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), and Communism and China:
Ideology in Flux (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). Lawrence Stone, born in
1919, is Dodge Professor of History and director of the Shelby Cullom
Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. He is the
author of Sculpture in Britain: The Middle Ages (London, 1955), An
Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (Oxford, 1956), and The Crisis of
the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Ox ford, 1965). John E. Talbott, born in
1940, is assistant professor of history at Prince ton University. He is the
author of The Politics of Educational Reform in France, 1918-1940
(Princeton, 1969).
 Historical Studies Today by Felix Gilbert; Stephen R. Graubard
Review by: Theodore K. Rabb
The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Jun., 1974), pp. 337-
341

Book Reviews

Historical Studies Today. Edited by Felix Gilbert and Stephen R.

Graubard. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1972. Pp. xxi+469. $12.00.

As befits their concern with change over time, historians hugely enjoy
analyzing the state and progress of their own profession. At least, that is
the impression conveyed by the steady stream of books on the subject.
Sometimes, as in Fritz Stern's Varieties of History (Cleveland, 1956), the
purpose is merely to show the novice how kaleidoscopic the melange
called "history" can be. At other times-when, for example, the
nonhistorian Ved Mehta produced his Fly and the Fly-Bottle (Boston,
1963)-the main aim seems to be the entertainment of the world at large.
More recently, however, particularly in the Times Literary Supplement's
"New Ways in History" issue (1966), John Higham, Leonard Krieger,
and Felix Gilbert's History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), Charles Tilly
and David Landes's History as Social Science (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1971), and Lee Benson's Toward the Scientific Study of History
(Philadelphia, 1972), the sights have been set somewhat higher. These
are either solidly researched analyses of recent and current work or
programs for the future. The difference between the two types is not
sharp, because the surveys indicating where scholarship has just been
usually imply (and often assert) where it ought to be going. Historical
Studies Today is no exception. The title is something of a misnomer,
unless "today" is given the broadest possible interpretation, because
most of the authors spend large sections of their essays on the
accomplishments of the last fifty or 100 years. The word "epigone" is
quite a favorite, as are such stalwarts as Michelet, Ranke, and Meinecke,
all of whom get as many or more mentions than Fernand Braudel. If, as
the jacket informs us, this is "an inside view of a discipline in ferment,"
it has certainly been brewing a long time. Yet that is the historian's
natural procedure for establishing current trends and future possibilities-
he probes as far back as possible so as to uncover origins. If, therefore,
the book gives a great deal of attention to historians both dead and yet
unborn while ostensibly exploring the present, it thereby epitomizes the
literature it represents. Equally typical is the absence of a clear and
distinct message, notwithstanding the avowed wish "to fill the gap which
exists between what people believe the historian is doing and what he is
really doing" (p. xxi). Over a dozen of the essays deal with branches of
the discipline defined either by subject matter (urban, local, social,
economic, intellectual, educational, scientific, political, and military
history) or by method (quantification, prosopography, archaeology, and
psychology). Two more are substantive articles, telling us little about the
state of the profession, though they do give us excellent examples of,
first, quantitative research (one essay on the French army in the
nineteenth century) and, second, of a new genre which,

drawing on the title of its chief journal, one can call Livre et societe
(an essay analyzing French reading habits on the eve of the Revolution).
These seem somewhat out of place, as do Arthur Schlesinger's spirited
but slightly strained defense of the historian as participant in great
events, and Jan Vansina's weighty but technical evaluation of African
oral history. Leaving aside these four contributions, which relate only
tangentially to the evaluation of contemporary scholarship that is the
book's main purpose, we are still confronted by an uncertain set of
recommendations. One message that comes through consistently is the
need to establish better relations with other disciplines. This is a banner
which everyone can wave, and yet the seriousness of the commitment is
open to question. If there is any sister department whose qualities
perfectly complement those of history, it is anthropology. Nevertheless,
only the two non-Western historians (Jan Vansina and Benjamin
Schwartz) refer to the subject at any length, and most of their remarks
are concerned with Claude L6vi-Strauss. Such influential figures as E. E.
Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz go completely
unmentioned. Modern psychology and psychoanalysis fare better,
because they are the subject of one article, but they receive significant
notice in only one other. And it is apparent that almost all the
contributors (some of whom treat "data" as a singular) are innocent of a
solid comprehension of statistics and the workings of the computer. One
writer goes so far as to suggest that quantification could be allowed in
small doses, because "a simple computer would do no harm" (p. 292).
Anybody possessed of minimal familiarity with these machines could
derive considerable amusement from the attempt to define "simple" in
that context: Not very clever? Easy to work? Ten fingers? The
misconception is fundamental. Nor will the article specifically devoted
to quantification advance the cause significantly. Its call for archives of
machine-readable material is admirable enough, though this is now a
well-worn plea. Historians have been making such appeals in the United
States for more than a decade, and despite their one spectacular success,
the archive of electoral and census statistics at the Inter-University
Consortium for Political Research in Ann Arbor, their more utopian
expectations (which are the ones repeated here) are now receding.
Instead, they are coming to appreciate that, in an age 'of dwindling'
research funds, resources will have to be accumulated very slowly, by
individual effort, and that it will be decades, rather than years, before
vast data banks, covering centuries and continents, open their doors. A
similar chimera is the forecast of a computer responsive to verbal
commands. As long as historians think of quantification in terms of
machines making old tasks easy, and ignore the powerful and
unprecedented advances in analysis that modern statistics makes
possible, they will not progress into the era of interdisciplinary research
that this volume envisions.
Significantly, the most elegant, informed, and stimulating article
about statistics (in fact, about the entire range of relations between
history and the social sciences) is by John Habakkuk, entitled
"Economic History and Economic Theory." Economists and economic
historians have had the longest experience of interdepartmental
exchanges, and it is thus not inappropriate that one of their number
should produce the subtlest and most

plausible assessment of the future of such borrowings. Indeed, his

essay is the best discussion I have seen of the advantages and pitfalls
open to the historian who applies both quantitative and nonquantitative
social science theories to historical materials. A number of other
interdisciplinary recommendations seem either muted or unhopeful.
Although Eric Hobsbawm's survey of the main efforts in social history
in recent years recognizes the influence of other disciplines, he seems
dubious about the prospect of further interaction, particularly with
sociology. Thomas Kuhn unanswerably berates historians for their
ignorance of (and indifference to) science, but his essay is almost a bill
of particulars as to why the situation is unlikely to improve markedly in
the foreseeable future. And both Moses Finley on archaeology and
Stephan Thernstrom on urban history take considerable pains to dampen
the fascination with those fields. In all these cases the cautions are
justified and well taken. Still, one wishes that the authors could have
conveyed more of a sense of confidence in their respective subjects.
Kuhn alone seems certain that he is on the side of the angels, generating
an enthusiasm for science that is matched only by the advocacy of
psychology and psychoanalysis in the articles by Frank Manuel and
Peter Paret. The latter is also exceptional in seeing his field, military
history, as an unequivocal source of exciting opportunities for research,
particularly with interdisciplinary tools. More well worn paths, such as
intellectual, political, and diplomatic history, are not ignored, but as soon
as they are mentioned the tone of the book seems to change. For one
group, the five Frenchmen of the Vie Section of the Ecole Pratique des
Hautes Etudes, these outmoded forms have been consigned to oblivion.
The most extreme (and insupportable) rejection is Jacques Le Goff's "the
old political history is still a corpse that has to be made to lie down." His
preference is for "a new political history . . . dedicated to structures,
social analysis, semeiology and the study of power" (p. 348). To a
greater or lesser degree, the other Frenchmen agree, simultaneously
condemning the old intellectual history to an equivalent fate.
The response of Gordon Craig, Benjamin Schwartz, and Felix Gilbert
is to mount a redoubtable defense. For Craig, diplomatic history is a
superb means of exploring the interaction of individual and structure-an
enterprise the French apparently do not consider worth pursuing. And
Schwartz makes a strong case for the study of conscious behavior in
both political and intellectual history-the actions of men as individuals
and not as the helpless victims of massive "forces." To the French, this is
doubtless as great a heresy as Craig's, for the discussions of serial history
and the longue dur~e in this book imply that the great cycles of the past
have lives of their own. The despised histoire evenementielle, dwelling
on the unique event or the policies of a few men, can never achieve
insights to match those that will accrue when "general history has sat at
the feet of serial history" (p. 60). To such exaggerations the most direct
answer comes from Gilbert, at the end of a carefully wrought and broad-
gauged outline of recent developments in intellectual history. Rebuking
those who, in his words, think that "only social history is 'true history,' "
that "a history of events deals with factors that are ephemeral," he makes
his case all the more telling by this restraint:

"This claim diminishes the value of all other branches of history and
necessarily evokes the opposition of their practitioners" (p. 155). Great
though the achievements of the Annales school have been, its pioneering
stage seems to be over, and until its apostles stop propounding absurdly
grandiose claims about the future of historical research, they will
continue to encounter reproofs such as Gilbert's, whose very moderation
commands agreement. On the evidence of Historical Studies Today, the
Vie Section does not have the best of the argument, and one only wishes
that the polemic could have been avoided. Nobody can deny the
enormous value of the French contribution to our discipline; but the
programmatic statements invite immediate, and in this case decisive,
rebuttal. Moreover, it is not the dispute over the merit of different kinds
of history that,is the book's chief contribution: it is the multiplicity itself
that the editors obviously wish to convey. To this end, they evidently
encouraged the preparation of introductory bibliographies in various
areas, and in this connection the articles by Manuel, Finley, Pierre
Goubert (on French local history), Thernstrom, Le Goff, and Vansina are
particularly useful. Two other articles, by Lawrence Stone on
prosopography (collective biography) and by John Talbott on the history
of education, are primarily reviews of the literature, and they should
become standard references. Both authors assess the development,
shortcomings, and accomplishments of the fields they survey, and
conclude on a mildly hopeful note. Stone even regards prosopography as
a potential catalyst "in the re-creation of a unified field out of the loose
confederation of jealously independent topics and techniques which at
present constitutes the historian's empire" (p. 134). Omitting the first
nine words, that last quotation could very well stand as the best
description of Historical Studies Today. Far from suggesting, in the
words of the preface, that the discipline may be in "crisis" (p. vii), the
book gives an impression of great liveliness and openness to new ideas.
All of the contributors peer eagerly into the mists of the future, certain
that fascinating revelations lie immediately ahead. If they seem
equivocal about one of the chief paths to the future, interdisciplinary
research, and occasionally too confident about their own constructions
(notably serial history), they do not appear to doubt that the discipline
will be very different a few years hence. Even the one small note of
pessimism-Gilbert's concern about declining enrollments in history
courses-has been dispelled since the book was published, because the
latest figures from the American Historical Association indicate
enrollments rising once more.
To say that this book gives a good idea of current research in history
is not, however, to admit that its predictions are likely to be any better
than those of all the other "state of the art" books that the profession
keeps producing. Lest one be carried away by the prospect of a
discipline bursting at the seams with new paths, directions, or ways, it is
worth recalling another look into the future, which promised that history
is escaping from the limitations formerly imposed upon the study of the
past. It will come in time consciously to meet our daily needs; it will avail
itself of all those discoveries that are being made ... by anthropologists,
economists, psychologists and sociologists.... There is no branch of ...
science which has not undergone the most remarkable changes during the
last half century, and many new branches of social science … have been
added to the long list. It is inevitable that history should be involved in this
revolutionary process, but since it must be confessed that this necessity
has escaped many contemporaneous writers, it is no wonder that the
intelligent public continues to accept somewhat archaic ideas of the scope
and character of history.

The words are James Harvey Robinson's, and they were first
published in March 1912.

THEODORE K. RABB
Princeton University
 Preface to the Issue "Historical Studies Today"

In December 1969, in his presidential address at the annual meeting

of the American Historical Association, C. Vann Woodward warned his
colleagues that the "boom" characteristic of historical studies since the
end of the Second World War appeared to be coming to an end. Looking
at various indices that suggested a diminished in terest in history,
Woodward drew attention also to the many evi dences of antihistorical
bias in contemporary culture; neither the humanities nor the arts, he
explained, showed any great partiality for history or historical
explanation. The warnings that Woodward eloquently expressed a year
ago have been repeated many times since. There is growing acceptance
of the fact that a major turning away from historical study is threatened
both in the schools and colleges of America, and this is seen to have the
most important implications for the character of learning in our society.
It is extraordinary that such a development is occurring at a time
when professional historians believe?and their claim is made neither out
of immodesty nor out of inadequate regard for earlier historical
scholarship?that professional historical investigation is flourishing, and
is as robust as it has ever been. While professional historians find their
methods and objectives challenged in certain quarters?sometimes
explicitly, more often by implication?they are naturally led to wish to
explain their work, to indicate how it dif fers from that of earlier
generations.
Those in the profession, excited by what they perceive to be new
scholarly opportunities, find it hard to accept the charges of
"irrelevance" and "bias" leveled by some who stand outside; yet, there is
no possibility of meeting such charges unless an effort is made to
describe and explain what historians are in fact doing to day. For a
profession that is international, involved in wide-ranging studies of very
different kinds of phenomena, there is no easy way to render all the
major tendencies that may be said to have im portance. One can only
indicate trends and suggest directions that scholars appear to find
congenial.
 Fashions in historical scholarship do not change rapidly. It is
significant that many of the analytical schemes now prominent in
historical studies owe their origins to tentative efforts first made in the
1920's and 1930's. As Lawrence Stone indicates in his article on
prosopography, the historical profession between the wars faced a major
crisis, stemming, in his view, from the near exhaustion of the great
tradition of Western historical scholarship that established itself in the
nineteenth century. Professional historians had gener ally involved
themselves in a close analysis of state archives; their investigations led
them to write works dealing largely with institu tional, administrative,
constitutional, and diplomatic themes. In the years after the First World
War there was a movement away from this tradition, a movement that
gained great momentum through the development of the so-called
"Annales school" in France.
Rarely did any group of historians have such a wide-ranging
influence as those, inspired by the example and writings of Marc Bloch
and Lucien Febvre, who now employed the Annales as the principal
vehicle for disseminating their "new history." While the influence of the
Annales school has sometimes been exaggerated? Jacques Le Goff is
quick to admit this?its message was unmistak able; it challenged
conventional historical writing, and questioned the kinds of documentary
evidence favored by most professional historians. Though the Annales
historians were suspicious of tradi tional political history, Le Goff
suggests that they were in no sense unaware of the importance of
politics. Their battle was with his torical conventions that permitted the
historian to be satisfied to write sprightly narratives, that made history
seem an episodic phe nomenon in which political activity was a
separable part. A new kind of political history needs to be written?Le
Goff argues?one that is concerned with "long-term structures" and that
involves the study of "the various semeiological systems belonging to
the sci ence of politics: vocabulary, rites, behavior, mental attitudes."
Poli tics needs to be made a part of general history, and politics involves
nothing less than a study of power. To study power involves anal ysis of
a kind that the nonprofessional historian is rarely capable of making. Le
Goff does not suggest that we can do without "a chronology of political
events or the biographies of great men," but this is not the work that the
professional historian ought principally to address himself to.
A similar concern is reflected in Eric Hobsbawm's considera tions on
the present status of social history. He sees that one of the

jor tendencies of contemporary historical scholarship is its move from

an old-fashioned interest in particular phenomena, defined as belonging
to the category of social history, to a concern with the history of society.
Social history, in the hands of older historians, was a kind of residual
category: it was what was left over after the really important themes?
political, constitutional, diplomatic?had been treated. Social history,
which once stood at the periphery of the historian's concern, is,
according to Hobsbawm, now at the cen ter. This has meant a new
respect for certain kinds of data, and a more conscientious effort to
secure and interpret materials that would have been ignored in an earlier
period. In place of the state documents that once served the historian,
wholly new kinds of documentation are now seen to be necessary. Quite
new fields have gained prominence: demography and kinship, social
classes and social groups, modernization and industrialization, social
move ments and movements of social protest. Hobsbawm does not
imply that such themes did not figure in the earlier work of certain his
torians; only, that all have recently institutionalized themselves as fields
of inquiry, and now can lay claim to organization, method ology, and a
system of publications that makes them international scientific
enterprises. There are great possibilities for a new history of society,
although Professor Hobsbawm does not claim that they are near
realization. He writes: "Let me put my cards on the table. I cannot point
to any single work which exemplifies the history of society to which we
ought, I believe, to aspire." Lawrence Stone, in his article on
prosopography, more commonly described as collective biography,
discusses one of the new meth ods which make a new approach to social
history possible. Again, the incentive for such study has not developed
overnight; as a form of historical inquiry, it has been building for four
decades. While it appears to be concerned principally with social
structure and social mobility, it has a political dimension as well; it seeks
to ex plain how class interest may affect political action. While some of
the research has dwelled largely on groups that may be called "power
elites," there is a second school?"the more statistically minded mass
school," in Stone's words, that is concerned with great movements of
popular opinion. Each school is animated by a quite different interest
and uses somewhat different methods. While cer tain kinds of group
biography are favored by American scholars, others are preferred by the
British, and still others by the French. The purpose of prosopography,
however, ought not to be simply

the development of monographs on individual groups; a larger pur

pose needs to be envisaged. Professor Stone writes: "It [prosopog raphy]
could be a means to bind together constitutional and insti tutional history
on the one hand and personal biography on the other, which are the two
oldest and best developed of the histori an's crafts, but which have
hitherto run along more or less parallel lines ... it could form the missing
connection between political history and social history, which at present
are all too often treated in largely watertight compartments, either in
different monographs or in different chapters of a single volume."
Investigations in the area of social history have received a strong
impetus from the development of a new field which has become
fashionable both in Europe and the United States: quantitative his tory.
As Fran?ois Furet indicates, all sorts of historical themes are subsumed
under the title "quantitative history," and not the least of Furet's concerns
is to indicate what the subject is in fact about. He sees that quantitative
history has certain limitations: it is not equally applicable to all periods
of human history and is only really useful for periods where certain
kinds of data exist. Thus, for him, "quan titative history presupposes the
existence and elaboration of long series of homogeneous and
comparable data, and the first problem which presents itself in new
terms is that of sources." Serial history, or quantitative history, cannot be
narrative; its concern is to resolve certain problems, and it does this most
efficiently if it analyzes data that describes a long-term process. Since
many of the data that the quantitative historians use were not prepared
with any such use in mind, they require an initial manual system of
analysis. The task of creating the "archive" is different from any that
historians have been traditionally confronted with; the historian is forced
to think carefully about the influence that the manner of their
construction will have on their quantitative application. Inevitably such
analysis involves the use of methods and concepts derived from other dis
ciplines in the social sciences, particularly from economics. The new
history provides an opportunity to see change in new dimen sions; this,
Furet says, can only contribute to a revising of many of the large
historical interpretations that have been inherited. Pierre Goubert's
contribution can serve as an example of the vitalizing effect which the
new methods of social history have had in a particular field. Local
history has for a long time been the work of gifted amateurs and there
has been a tendency for the profes sional historian to disparage or ignore
work in this field. Pierre

Goubert indicates how such highly specialized study, if applying new

methods, has provided abundant new evidence, challenging any number
of conventional opinions about larger historical phe nomena. Thus, for
example, the whole notion of the seventeenth century "crisis" in France
has been substantially revised as the re sult of research primarily
concerned with local history. If the story of local history is a "success
story," like all such tales it carries cer tain hazards with it. Professor
Goubert is concerned to indicate what certain of those dangers are. The
fact that local history ap pears to be an exercise involving the use of
relatively finite mate rials makes it popular as a thesis subject; but
accumulation of in dividual monographs that have no relation one to the
other would, in Goubert's view, be a great waste of human and material
resources. Because in Great Britain and the United States the
development of local history has developed along lines somewhat
different from those pursued in France, Professor Stone has written
briefly about both, seeking to supplement the information provided by
Goubert. As part of the new interest in social history, there is also a grow
ing interest in the history of education. This is one of the classic
"underdeveloped" fields in historical research. While bibliograph ical
citations in the field are overwhelming, John Talbott points out that too
much of it is simply "house history" or a recounting of "the ideas of
pedagogical reformers." Major studies of education as a social process
are rare. This is the lack that the new historians work ing in the field are
seeking to remedy. Their concern is essentially with the interplay
between education and society. The effects of education in perpetuating
particular class structures have never been sufficiently studied. If
patterns of education contribute to the maintenance of certain forms of
social stratification, so, also, pat terns of social stratification influence
the structure of education. The relations between education and politics
is another area which waits to be opened. Even on an issue such as
literacy, where it is assumed that a great deal is known, only the most
superficial understanding exists. Too much of the earlier history of
education, Talbott tells us, was dominated by a narrow Whig
interpretation which set out to tell a success story. Suddenly, the
realization grows that there is a very different kind of story to tell, and
that this calls for new modes of analysis. We may be on the threshhold
of a large resur gence of interest in this area. The new histories of
education ( and of educational institutions) could have a profound
influence in thinking about politics, economic development, and social
change.

Talbott argues persuasively that education needs to be seen as a

process "deeply entangled in the life of an entire society," and that it
should not be made a separate area of study, appropriated by a
specialized group of scholars. Talbott's demand for placing the history of
education in a broad context is the more appropriate because the history
of education forms a part not only of social but also of intellectual
history. The term "intellectual history" is of recent date and is in use
almost ex clusively in the United States. Study of the subjects with
which in tellectual history is concerned is traditional however, although,
as Felix Gilbert shows, the manner of treatment of these subjects has
been changed and refined so that there is justification for the use of a
new term. The new development began with the end of the nineteenth
century when various intellectual movements?positiv istic philosophy,
the rise of the natural sciences, Marxian material ism?led to the
repudiation of the notion that history was a process controlled by ideas.
In Gilbert's words: "What happened in his torical scholarship was a
narrowing of the area of scholarly con cerns: research focused on
documentary sources and history became exclusively political history";
in the twentieth century it became necessary for the intellectual historian
to work against an opinion that was overtly hostile to his effort. The
contribution of Dilthey in providing a new pattern for the biography of
an intellectual figure was followed by others who realized that "any
intellectual work is the product of its author's mind, but it is also shaped
by its function. It is part of an intellectual debate. It answers questions
which have previously been raised." By becoming more critical about
how the historian analyzes the mind of an individual, the profession
became more critical also about describing and defining the intellectual
outlook of an entire period. The historian might be gin by being
concerned about the ideas of a ruling group; he was soon led to interest
himself in the ideas of all classes in society. These are new perspectives
involving wholly new kinds of mate rials. Nevertheless, Professor
Gilbert does not believe that the role of the intellectual historian is to
reconstruct a Zeitgeist, or that he will ever be able to do so. Rather, he
points out, "it might be more modest to say that the intellectual historian
reconstitutes the mind of an individual or of groups at the times when a
particular event happened or an advance was achieved. This "modest"
task is ac tually a task of great import: "It is human consciousness which
con nects the long-range factors and forces and the individual event,

and it is at this crucial point of the historical process that the in

tellectual historian does his work." If political and intellectual history
sometimes appear to be on the defensive, Benjamin Schwartz is not
inclined to apologize for either. He does not accept the idea that political
or intellectual his tory has lost in significance, or that political history
properly stud ied need lead to episodic history, any more than
intellectual history need lead to an exclusive concern with an
outstanding in dividual. Political history for Schwartz involves
"conscious activity set within the framework of all the problems,
pressures, and con straints" imposed by a particular situation. It is
impossible to con ceive of politics except as a phenomenon involving
conscious inten tion and conscious activity. Political history need not
give undue attention to the acts of small groups or of individuals; it need
not be elitist, nor is there any reason for the elitist label to be applied to
intellectual history. Using examples from his studies of traditional and
contemporary China, Schwartz indicates the numerous ques tions that
the intellectual historian is in a position to ask, and that will involve him
in something other than the study of individual intellectual figures.
Against L?vi-Strauss's concern with "dissolving man" Schwartz
indicates his own preference for an interpretation of history that will aid
in "constituting man." An example of the tasks which the intellectual
historian faces and of the manner in which he solves them is given by
Robert Darnton. He opens his article by saying: "Historians have always
taken what a society writes, publishes, and reads as a guide to its culture,
but they have never taken all its books as guidebooks. In stead, they
select a few works as representative of the whole and settle down to
write intellectual history." Over the last sixty years the weaknesses of
that approach have been recognized and the consequences were attempts
to develop a sociology of literature in dicating who read what at what
time. The results of such quantita tive studies are frequently doubtful.
However, Darnton suggests that they have made an enormous
contribution in demonstrating the importance of a literary culture in
more than merely literary terms. Darnton explains this view by a
discussion of French literary culture in the eighteenth century. As
Darnton says, "Books have a social life and an economic value. All the
aspects of their existence ?literary, social, economic, and even political?
came together with the greatest force in the publishing industry of the
eighteenth cen tury." He believes that there were basically two kinds of
book pro

duction and distribution in the eighteenth century: one was legal, the
other was clandestine. Both, he argues, are crucial to our un derstanding
of the culture and the politics of the Old Regime. Darnton's essay, by
dwelling on both these universes, suggests a wholly new interpretation
not only of the Enlightenment, but also of the last years of the Ancien R?
gime. We have entered a new area not only in studying what individ uals
and groups thought but also in examining why they thought what they
thought. Frank Manuel, in his interpretation of "The Use and Abuse of
Psychology in History," accepts that there are historical precedents for a
serious historical interest in psychology that go back at least to the time
of Vico. However, it was not until the last decades of the nineteenth
century that a major breakthrough occurred. It was only with the
emergence of Freud that the ground was laid for a more fundamental
innovation in the use of psycho logical concepts in history. Though the
Freudian method of anal ysis was historical, no historian at the time
suspected its large po tential importance for historical scholarship. The
most subtle use of Freud, perhaps, Manuel says, has been made by Erik
Erikson. How ever, he questions whether Erikson's "ideal psychological
model of human development in eight stages" is in fact universally
applica ble. Has Erikson not drawn entirely on twentieth-century psycho
analytic experience? What relevance has such experience to other
cultures and periods? Moving from his study of Erikson's work, Manuel
considers the efforts by Sartre to develop portraits based on a
psychologized Marxist framework. He finds in Sartre's Flaubert "a
brilliant synthesis of Marxist and Freudian insights." Manuel ac cepts
that psychological history remains a dubious form of inquiry to many
who call themselves professional historians. This, however, cannot
obscure the great distance that has been traversed since the early part of
the century. Manuel is disposed to cast in his lot with the Freudian
"psychologizers." He says: "The new psychologies can open up whole
new areas of inquiry by encouraging the historian to ask some direct,
perhaps impertinent questions. The restriction of the method to
biography, where it has enjoyed at least partial acceptance, should not be
a lasting confinement. Historians will have to wrestle anew with
symbolic representation on a broad scale." M. I. Finley illustrates why it
is sometimes difficult to bring to bear on the study of history the
technical innovations and discov eries of other fields of scholarship.
Finley's report on the relation

between history and archaeology is not encouraging. He suggests that

though archaeology has advanced immensely in the last half century, the
historian's profit from such archaeological investiga tion has not been
great. What historians require of archaeologists, Finley writes, is "a
willingness to devote themselves to precisely formulated historical
questions and a far greater consciousness of the value of statistics, for
which pencil and paper and elementary numeracy are on the whole
sufficient, though a simple computer would do no harm." Archaeologists
concerned principally with clas sification and chronology have been
unwilling to respond to such explicit historical demands, and have
argued that historical ques tions must wait for another time. Professor
Finley has no sympathy for that plea; he expresses more understanding
of the argument that archaeologists are already overworked, and that
there is still so much excavation to be done that those engaged in such
efforts cannot possibly address themselves to the problems of the
historian. Still, there is no question that the present strategies of
investigation pursued by archaeologists do not in fact satisfy the author;
he writes: "Of what use ... is the vast outpouring of annual reports on the
year's work from which nothing emerges except the occa sional isolated
fact, often canceled or corrected in the next year's work or the third or
the fourth year's? Of what use are more and more excavations when so
many older ones have not been fully re ported, and no small number
have not been published at all? And, finally, of what use is archaeology
anyway, apart from the museum pieces that sometimes come out of the
debris, if it leads to nothing more than reports?" Mr. Finley blames not
only the archaeologists, but also the ancient historians; they are "too
often satisfied with impressions, too often nonnumerate and
nonquantitative, too often imprecise in the questions they put to
themselves, about documen tary as about archaeological evidence."

This issue of D dalus could not have been undertaken without the
assistance of Professor Felix Gilbert, who has served as Guest Editor. A
great debt is owed to him, and also to Professor Lawrence Stone, who
assisted us in formulating many of the questions. An early meeting of a
small planning group took place at the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton; we are indebted to the Institute and to its Director, Dr. Carl
Kaysen, for providing a congenial set ting for profitable and stimulating
discussion. Finally, a particular debt is owed the Ford Foundation. A
grant from the Foundation

to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to support inquiry in

the humanities, has made this issue possible. A meeting in Rome in the
summer of 1970 provided an incomparable opportunity for the exchange
of views on early drafts of these articles. This is the first of two issues
that we propose to publish on "Historical Studies Today."

S.R.G.
 Is Politics Still the Backbone
of History?

JACQUES LE GOFF

To A historian trained in what, rightly or wrongly, has been called

"the Annales school," the title of this essay may in itself seem strange.
The Annales historian was brought up on the idea that political history
was obsolete and out of date. Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre had said so
over and over again. They even in¬voked the great precursors of modern
history. Voltaire, in the Essai sur les Moeurs et l'esprit des nations,
wrote: "For the last fourteen hundred years, the only Gauls, apparently,
have been kings, ministers and generals."' Jules Michelet wrote to
Charles Sainte-Beuve in 1857: "If I had included only political history in
my narrative, if I had taken no account of the various other ele¬ments of
history (religion, law, geography, literature, art, and so forth ), my
approach would have been quite different. But I needed a great sweeping
movement because all these different elements gravitated together to
form one whole."2 Again, referring to his His¬tory of France, Michelet
said: "Here again I can only say I was on my own. Scarcely anything
was ever provided but political his¬tory, acts of government, a few
words about institutions. No one took any account of what accompanies,
explains, and is in part the foundation of political history: social,
economic and industrial con¬ditions, the state of literature and
thought."3
At the same time most historians consciously or unconsciously came
under the influence of Marxism, whether to follow it, more or less
rigidly, or to challenge it, more or less openly. But too hasty a reading of
Marx could suggest that he ranged politics among the superstructures of
society, and considered political history an epiphenomenon of the
history of production relations. There is the well-known passage in the
preface to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy: "The
aggregate of production relations con-

DIEDALUS
stitutes the economic structure of society, the concrete base on which
there rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which cer¬tain
forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of pro¬duction
relating to material life determines the pattern of social, political and
intellectual life in general."' Without necessarily see¬ing in Marx's
attitude to politics, theoretical and practical (le politique and la
politique), the fundamental pessimism ascribed to it by some—usually
hostile—commentators," one may still con¬clude that a conception like
the "withering away of the state" is not likely to enhance the prestige of
anything to do with politics, political history included.
This might be thought a one-sided view, to be found only in a
historian misled by a specifically French tradition and an exag¬gerated
idea of the influence of Marxism. Not at all. Frenchmen have been
among political history's stoutest supporters." And Jo¬han Huizinga,
neither a Frenchman nor by any means a Marxist, in the course of his
work gradually moved away from political his¬tory. In The Task of
Cultural History' he accords it no more than a declining ascendancy,
based chiefly on the fact that it is both easy and clear. Since Huizinga
was not personally attracted by economic and social history, though he
noted their "irresistible rise,"" he soon turned his main efforts to the
establishing of a scientific cultural his¬tory.
Economics, society, and culture seem to have monopolized his-
torians' attention for the last half-century. Political history, the in¬sulted
and injured, even seems to have been drawn into the episte-mological
uncertainties arising from the attempt by certain schools of sociology to
blur the distinction between practical and theoretical politics. To
mention only two leading figures in present- day French sociology,
Alain Touraine has recently emphasized the "two-fold weakness" of
political analysis in the social sciences," and Edgar Morin points out the
"crisis" in politics owing to the in¬vasion of its field from all sides by
the techniques and sciences.'" Will the atomization of politics itself
entail a corresponding disintegra¬tion of political history, already driven
back on uncomfortable posi¬tions within its own discipline? To
understand the setbacks suffered by political history in the twentieth
century, we must analyze the factors that made it flourish before.
Its former ascendancy was doubtless linked to the predominat¬ing
form taken on, between the fourteenth and twentieth cen¬turies, first by
the society of the Ancien Regime and then by the

Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?

society which emerged from the French Revolution. The rise of the
monarchical state, of the Prince and his servants, brought to the forefront
of the political stage a shadow-show of courtly and gov-ernment
marionettes which bedazzled both historians and people. Aristotelianism
in various shapes and forms, especially after the thirteenth century and
Aquinas, provided a vocabulary and con¬cepts in which these new
realities could be represented. But the triumph of politics and of political
history was not immediate. They were adopted rapidly enough in Italy
under the stimulus of the rise of the "signorie." But in France, in spite of
a step forward under Charles V, the Aristotelian king, who between
1369 and 1374 had Nicole Oresme translate ( from a Latin text)
Aristotle's Politics and Ethics and a treatise on economics, it was not
until the seven¬teenth century that the noun politique ( politics) came
into cur¬rent use, consolidating that of the adjective, which had been
established since the sixteenth century. The word politique itself
probably benefited from the promotion of all the words belonging to the
polls family. These, together with those deriving from urbs¬urbain
(urban), urbanite (urbanity), urbanisme (town-planning) —between them
cover a large part of the semantic field of civiliza¬tion. It is perhaps
through police ( which did not produce police [organized, civilized] until
the nineteenth century) that we ar¬rive at politesse ( politeness ), which
appears in the seventeenth century. The realm of le politique, la
politique, and les politiques ( theoretical politics, practical politics, and
politicians) is thus the realm of the elite, and it is from this that political
history derived its nobility. It was part of the aristocratic style. Hence the
revolu¬tionary aim of Voltaire, to write "instead of the history of kings
and courts the history of men." It looked as if philosophical history
would drive out political history. But in fact it usually came to terms
with it. One example can be seen in the abbe Raynal's Histoire
philosophique et politique des etablissements et du commerce des
Europeens dans les deux Indes.11
The Revolution of 1789, though it ultimately led in the nine¬teenth
century to the transmission of political power to the bour¬geoisie, did
not destroy the prerogatives of political history. Ro¬manticism made it
totter but did not bring it down. Chateaubriand, who could recognize
modernity in history as well as in politics and ideology, though he did so
only to reject it, was an isolated case.12 Francois Guizot, even more than
Augustin Thierry, led history further along the path toward history of
civilization,13 but since

both were primarily concerned with showing the rise of the bour-
geoisie, they remained bogged down in political history. But the
"conquering middle classes" not only annexed political history in all its
glory—they also took as much delight as their predecessors in a
historical model which was monarchical and aristocratic: a typical
example of the cultural time-lag which makes a parvenu class affect
traditional tastes. Michelet is a solitary peak.
To take the case of France alone, not until the beginning of the
twentieth century did political history first withdraw and then succumb
before the blows of a new kind of history backed up by the new social
sciences—geography, and especially economics and sociology. Vidal de
la Blache, Francois Simiaud, and Emile Durk-heim were, whether they
realized it or not, the godparents of this new history. Its parents were
Henri Berr with the Revue de synthêse historique ( 1901 ), and even
more decisively Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre with the Annales
d'histoire economique et so¬ciale.
Raymond Aron has shown in his essay on Thucydides how closely
political history is linked to narrative and event.14 The An-nales school
loathed the trio formed by political history, narrative history, and
chronicle or episodic (evenementielle) history. All this, for them, was
mere pseudohistory, history on the cheap, a superficial affair which
preferred the shadow to the substance. What had to be put in its place
was history in depth—an economic, social, and mental history. In the
greatest book produced by the Annales school, Fernand Braudel's La
Mediterrange et le monde mediterraneen a rópoque de Philippe 11
( 1959 ), political history is relegated to part III, which far from being
the culmination of the work is more like the bits and pieces left over.
Once the back¬bone of history, political history has sunk to being no
more than an atrophied appendix: the parson's nose of history.
But political history was gradually to return in force by borrow¬ing
the methods, spirit, and theoretical approach of the very social sciences
which had pushed it into the background. I shall try to sketch this recent
comeback by taking medieval history as an ex-ample.15 Sociology and
anthropology's first and chief contribution to political history was to
establish as its central concept and aim the notion of "power" and the
facts relating to power. As Raymond Aron has observed, this notion and
these facts apply to all so¬cieties and all civilizations: "The problem of
Power is eternal, whether the earth is worked with a pick or with a
bulldozer."16

Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?

It should be noted in this connection that analyses made by political
historians in terms of "power" go beyond those in terms of "state" and
"nation," whether these are traditional studies or at¬tempts to approach
the question from a new angle.17 It is also worth remembering that
Marxism-Leninism, which has been accused of not showing enough
interest in political history and theory, has for a long time only
concerned itself in this field at the level of state and nation.18 Lastly,
while the word politics suggested the idea of surface and the superficial,
the word power evokes center and depth. Surface history having lost its
charm, political history becomes history in depth by becoming the
history of power. This verbal rehabilitation corresponds to a mental
evolution foresha¬dowed by Marc Bloch, who wrote shortly before his
death: "There is a lot to be said about this word 'political.' Why should it
always be taken as synonymous with superficial? Is not a history which
is centered, as it may quite legitimately be, on the evolution of modes of
government and on the fate of the governed, bound to try to understand
from the inside the facts it has chosen as the subject of its study?"19
The history of political depths started off, however, from the outside,
with the signs and symbols of power, as in the work of P. E. Schramm.
In a number of studies culminating in the great synthesis
Herrschaftzeichen and Staatssymbolik,2° he has shown that the objects
which were the characteristic signs of possessors of power in the Middle
Ages—crown, throne, orb, scepter, main, de
/ustice, and so forth—are not to be studied just in themselves. They
need to be restored to the context of attitudes and ceremonies of which
they formed part, and above all to be seen in the light of the political
symbolism from which they derive their true significance.21
 This symbolism was deeply rooted in a religious semeiology which
made the political sphere a province of the religious. Among all the
signs and insignia, one in particular lent itself to extensive development,
with regard both to politico-religious symbolism and to the institutions
in which that symbolism was historically em¬bodied. The whole
panorama of medieval politics, linked on one side with the hereditary
kingships of antiquity and on the other with the relics of monarchy
which have survived into modern times, radiated out from the crown.
The symbolic field ranged from the material object itself through the
coronation rites to the actual kingdom on one hand and the abstract idea
of monarchy on the other. A collection of studies on this political
panorama at

the end of the Middle Ages is to be found in Corona Regni: Studien

uber die Krone als Symbol des Staates in spaten Mittelal¬ter.22
Quite recently Georges Duby recalled the multiple symbolism of the
medieval crown in connection with the crown of thorns which St. Louis
placed in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.23 The reference immediately
presents a problem of method. Is this appeal to "po-litical" objects not
perhaps due to the nature of the period in ques-tion, and to the fact that
in the early Middle Ages texts are com-paratively rare? Is this not, then,
an ad hoc method rather than a really new and generally applicable way
of approaching the prob¬lem?
Curiously enough, the historians most interested in these as¬pects of
medieval political symbolism seem to accept such objec¬tions and to
minimize the importance of their own approach. Thus P. E. Schramm
writes: "The investigation of the insignia of power must be
supplemented by investigation of the symbolism of power in general.
This means that historical research, which first had to rely on chronicles,
then became more precise through the use of documents, letters, deeds,
and so on, still has a very long way to go in systematic development.
There are more objects and evidence available than expected, and an
adequate critical method has also been evolved. So the already existing
picture may be filled out and enriched. For the insignia used by the ruler
tell more about his expectations and claims, and tell it more definitely,
than other avail-able evidence. This applies especially to those centuries
for which written sources are very limited."24
Similarly Robert Folz, who thinks he discerns through differ¬ent
kinds of documentation different realities, writes: "Administra¬tive
documents, figurative representations, liturgical rites, exter¬nal signs
such as vestments and emblems—all these, together with a few narrative
texts, are our essential sources of information for the first part of the
Middle Ages, when symbol clearly predominated over theory as the
expression of political form. It is only from the twelfth century on, with
the revival of legal studies, that argumen¬tation and controversy start
providing an increasingly large part of our documentation."25
But the new political history, like all other branches of history, must
abandon the old prejudice that only faute de mieux, that is, in the
absence of texts, must it turn to nonwritten documentation. History has
to use all the evidence it can get, taking from every

Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?

kind its own particular contribution and establishing a hierarchy
among them all in terms not of the historian's own predilections but of
the system of values of the period concerned. This, needless to say, does
not prevent him from going on to treat data from the past according to
the standards of modern science, and with the help of all its equipment.
Every period has a political ceremonial the significance of which it is the
historian's job to discern; and this significance constitutes one of the
most important aspects of political history. An outstanding result of the
recent orientation of political history toward symbolism and ritual has
been a revalua¬tion of the significance of kingship within the political
system of feudalism. Before, the general opinion had been that
monarchy as an institution and the feudal system were antithetical, and
that it was out of the decay of feudalism that monarchical power, en
route to absolutism, arose at the end of the Middle Ages. According to
this view Charlemagne, by his policy of awarding fiefs, which tended to
become hereditary estates, as rewards for public service, unconsciously
brought into being the force which was to destroy the public authority he
himself had tried to recreate, and which was to subdue the royal power
that he, by adding to it the dignity of the imperial crown, thought to have
made invulnerable. This ex¬planation is now recognized as false in both
its terms. It arose from an inability to go beyond the hollow prestige of
the state to the study of power itself. But in the new context, with
anachronistic concepts of the state abandoned, medieval kingship,
particularly that of the Carolingian period, regained its full meaning, and
the feudal king was seen to derive his power not despite but within the
feudal system.26
It was through the methods of comparative history, borrowed from
anthropology and the history of religion, that medieval king-ship came
to have this new significance and that medieval political history was
transformed. Various joint publications set the seal on this change. True,
the Middle Ages in the West occupied only a small part of the
deliberations of the Thirteenth International Conference on the History
of Religion in Rome in 1955, the central theme of which was "The King-
God and the Sacred Nature of Kingship."27 This is true also of the
volume presented shortly after¬wards to Raffaelle Pettazzoni: The
Sacral Kingship—La Regolita Sacra.28 But a few years later the
Arbeitskreis fur mittelalterliche Geschichte, led by Theodor Mayer in
Constance, devoted a volume of its V Ortrage and Forschungen to
medieval kingship. Meanwhile

the work of Ernst H. Kantorowicz was growing up parallel to that of

Schramm Kantorowicz, after depicting the greatest sovereign of the
Middle Ages, Frederick II,22 went on to study medieval wor¬ship of
rulers through liturgical acclamation.30 His research cul¬minated in the
masterpiece The King's Two Bodies ( 1957 ), which restored to its
general historical background the conception of politi¬cal theology
which is an essential key to the understanding of the Middle Ages.31
Such were the results, in medieval history, of the trail blazed by Sir
James George Frazer, whose research into the magical ori¬gins of
kingship32 probably stimulated the historians' own researches into
medieval kingship, whether or not they were conscious of the fact or
prepared to admit it. One historian at least made no secret of his debt,
though he did not always agree with Frazer and pur¬sued his own
studies according to specifically historical methods— Marc Bloch. His
pioneer work, Les roil thaumaturges, published in 1924, is still in the
forefront of its field. Bloch is not content merely with describing
manifestations of the healing power ascribed to the kings of France and
England, or with tracing its history from its emergence to its
disappearance and explaining the theories behind it. He also tries to go
back to the springs of the collective psychology involved, studies its
"popularity" ( book II, chapter I), and at¬tempts to explain "how people
believed in the royal miracle" (pp. 420-430). In short, he draws up a
study model of "political mental attitudes," which he puts forward
simply as a special case—unique only in terms of its subject—of general
forms of mental attitude and sensibility. But in the vitally important
though as yet unexplored area of the history of mental attitudes, as far as
mental attitudes relating to politics are concerned almost everything still
remains to be done. Naturally there can be no question of applying to the
men of the Middle Ages the opinion poll methods which can contribute
to the study of modern political attitudes. But for the history of public
opinion in the Middle Ages, as for other questions, a prob¬lematic,
theoretical approach to the problem can be established.33
It may be noted at this point that political history and the sciences
which have influenced its recent evolution have some¬times alternated
in using one another as stepping stones. Thus, as we have seen, medieval
political history was transformed and en¬riched by adopting methods
borrowed from anthropology: new light was thrown on medieval
kingship by studies in archaic or primitive kingship. Medieval political
history thus seemed to leave

Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?

the surface ripples of episodic history for the deep diachronic strata of
proto- or para-historical societies.
Meanwhile, conversely, anthropology opened itself to historical
approaches, and scholars and researchers increasingly turned to political
anthropology:34 This method recognized, in societies "which have no
history," structures of disequilibrium and conflict, and established the
theoretical preliminaries necessary for providing them with a political
history. In so doing it brought out the fact that dynamic social history is
not incompatible with an anthropo¬logical view of societies and
civilizations. Political history did not necessarily lose its dynamism by
turning toward anthropology—it might even rediscover in it the
schemas, Marxist or otherwise, of the class struggle.35 Moreover, the
vocabulary and mental attitudes of the Middle Ages lend themselves to
the formulation of structures and social behavior in terms which are
partly political. The upper strata of society are often designated in
medieval texts by the term potentes, the powerful, generally in contrast
to the pauperes or poor; sometimes they are referred to as the superiores,
as opposed to inferiores.36
This corroborates researches in various sectors of medieval his-tory
which have identified in the basic phenomena a political dimension, in
the sense of a relationship to power. The most striking example is the
theory according to which, at various dates but usually around the year
A.D. 1000, the seigneuries foncieres, based on dues levied on land and
its economic exploitation, gave place more and more to seigneuries
based on the lords' powers of leader¬ship, organization, and justice:
these were known as seigneuries banales, from ban, the name for this
kind of feudal power. Thus the whole feudal structure right down to its
foundations takes on a coloring which is ultimately political." This
conception of feudalism, which does not exclude a final explanation in
terms of production relations, has the virtue of emphasizing the
importance of political factors, in the widest sense of the term, in the
functioning of the feudal system, and the weight exerted by political
forms in the dynamics of history.
The political aspect crops up again in cultural history. Education is a
power and an instrument of power. The gulf between litterati and
illitterati which lay so long between clerics and laymen, whether the
latter were otherwise powerful or not, shows social cleavages arising out
of demarcations between possession and non- possession of different
forms of power, between participation and

nonparticipation in these forms. For example, in the case of mem-bers

of the university a dual relationship with power begins to emerge in the
thirteenth century. On the one hand the world of the university tends to
form itself into its own kind of supreme power, alongside the power of
the church and the king—studium, alongside sacerdotium and
regnum.38 All those who enjoy the privileges of studium participate in
its power. At the same time, the result—if not the goal—of university
studies and distinctions becomes the attainment of some post or function
in lay or eccle¬siastical society which leads to participation in the other
kinds of power." If, in spite of the difficulties involved, a prosopography
of university students and masters in the Middle Ages could be worked
out,4° it would be possible to measure the impact of the university group
on the organization of medieval society, and there is no doubt that it
would emerge in the character and role of a "power elite."
New light could probably also be shed on medieval political history
by studying the application, in the Middle Ages, of the Dumezil schema
for Indo-European societies. We know the tri¬partite schema was in use
from the end of the ninth century, and that in the eleventh it took on the
stereotyped form of oratores, bellatores, laboratores. If we knew how
and why these ideas re¬appeared in the Middle Ages, and what was their
mental, intel¬lectual, and political effectiveness, we should probably be
able to trace more clearly the different aspects of medieval power, their
structures, relationships, and functioning. In my view, we should find
that this schema was one of the ideological bases of royal power, the
latter subsuming and acting as arbiter between the three functions.41
Even the realm of art would be illuminated by the application of
political analysis in the broad sense. It is not merely a question of
measuring the influence of patronage on the form, content, and evolution
of art.42 It is above all a matter of analyzing how the power of works of
art is ordered in relation to power in general. It seems to me that Erwin
Panofsky took a first step in this direction when he connected the Gothic
style, through the multivalent notion of "order" ( and hierarchy ), with
scholastic method; and then related both to a sociopolitical order
embodied in the Ile de France around A.D. 1200 by the Capetian
monarchy."
Above all Pierre Francastel, in Peinture et society: naissance et
destruction dun espace plastique, de la Renaissance an cubisme

Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?

(1951), has shown not only that politicians—the Medicis in
Flor¬ence, the patriciate in Venice—understood "the power of figurative
images of space" and made them instruments of their policy"
("Botticelli's Venus is a policy made explicit"), but also that the new
representation of space in terms of perspective is linked to a mental
revolution, to a mythical thought governed by "the social and economic
policy of giving."
In the realm of religious history one can cite as an example the
underlying links between heretical movements and political parties, a
subject in which research has scarcely begun.45 Similarly, in a context
relating at once to geography, sociology, and culture, one could point to
many modern studies in urban sociology" which show the towns, and
especially the town-planning, of the Middle Ages, as both an expression
and a vehicle of urban power and its possessors. W. Braunfels has made
an initial study of this kind for the cities of Tuscany.47
Finally, one can see coming into being—and it would be a good thing
if it were hierarchized even farther—a differential political history
functioning at various levels, according to what Fernand Braudel has
called "the times of history."48 In the short term there is traditional
political history: narrative, episodic, full of movement, but anxious to
pave the way for a deeper approach. Every so often it proposes
quantitative evaluations; it initiates social analyses; it accumulates
evidence for a future study of mental attitudes. In the longer term, to be
established according to the model for long-term movements proposed
by Francois Simiand, there will be a history of the phases or trends of
political history, in which no doubt, as Braudel hopes, social history in
the broad sense will still pre-dominate—political history with a
sociological emphasis. In between these two types of history, as in
economic history, there would be an area of common ground specially
devoted to studying the relationships between secular political trends on
the one hand and, on the other, short-term movements and episodic
highs and lows: a history of crises, in which structures and their
dynamics are revealed in their nakedness by the turmoil of events. Lastly
there comes a political history which would be almost immobile if it
were not linked, as political anthropology has shown it to be, to the
essentially conflictual and therefore dynamic structure of societies —a
political history of really long-term structures, comprising both the valid,
living part of geopolitics and also analysis based on anthropological
models. At every one of all these levels, particular

attention would be paid to the study of the various semeiological

systems belonging to the science of politics: vocabulary, rites, be-havior,
mental attitudes.
Although one may, as I did at the beginning of this essay, speak of a
certain crisis at present in political history, it is also true that political
aspects and approaches are of increasing importance in the human
sciences. Not only does the new science of politicology now contribute
its concepts, vocabulary, and methods, but geo¬politics too, still alive
and kicking though somewhat discredited, political sociology, and, as we
have seen, political anthropology, all give political history nourishment
and support.
I have described it as a new political history, different from the old—
dedicated to structures, social analysis, semeiology and the study of
power. This is certainly an overoptimistic picture. It is true I have every
so often recalled that much or all still remained to be done in certain
directions. But the fact is that the new political history I have tried to
sketch is as yet a dream rather than a reality.
Worse, the old political history is still a corpse that has to be made to
lie down. True, a grammar of political history is and will always remain
not only useful but necessary. We cannot do with¬out a chronology of
political events or the biographies of great men. In spite of the progress
of democracy, political history will always be, not only but also, the
history of great men. And now, thanks precisely to politicology and
sociology, we know better than before what an event is, and what
constitutes the conditioning of a great man.
But there is still a danger that political history in the vulgarized form
in which it appears in countless popularizing books and magazines may
once again invade the real science of history. There is a danger that
historians of economics and culture may be satis¬fied with producing a
political history of economics or culture, that is, a history of economic or
cultural politics. The reason for this is still the same as it was when
Lucien Febvre first inveighed against pseudohistory as a kind of history
which "makes few demands. Very few. Too few."4" And pseudohistory
still seems ready to be happy with half-measures. While it agrees to lift
itself up from the level of events and great men ( from which one can
always sneak in again by the back door to political history) to the level
of institutions and environments, it will still stick if it can with outmoded
conceptions of government or state. It puts up a poor

Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?

show against strict juridical conceptions: law, the hope of man¬kind,
is the historian's nightmare. It likes to dabble in the history of ideas and
political thought—but often both ideas and politics are superficial. With
the best will in the world it remains the most fragile form of history, and
the one most likely to succumb to all the old temptations.
I conclude with a fact perhaps worth restating. However much
political history may be renewed and regenerated by the other human
sciences, it cannot aspire to autonomy. To divide a single branch of
learning into separate compartments is more inadmissible than ever in
the age of pluridisciplinarity. The comment of Lucien Febvre, cofounder
of the Annales d'Histoire Economique et So-ciale, is truer now than ever:
"There is no such thing as economic or social history. There is just
history."" But it is still true that the models of the new general history
must accord the dimension of politics the same place as is occupied in
society by the phenomenon of power, which is the epistemological
incarnation of politics in the present. To pass from the age of anatomy to
that of the atom, political history is no longer the backbone of history but
its nu¬cleus.
This article was translated from the French by Barbara Bray.

REFERENCES
1. Cited by Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l'histoire, ou metier d'historien, 4th ed.
(Paris: Colin, 1961), p. 90.
2. Ibid., p. 78.
3. Cited by P. Wolff, "L'etude des economies et des societes avant l'ere statistique,"
in C. Samaran, ed., L'histoire et ses ingthodes, Encyclopedie de la Pleiade, 11 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1961), p. 847.
4. For example, on page 4 of the introduction to the interesting volume on Le
Modalisme, a special number of Recherches internationales a la lumiêre du marxisme,
no. 37 ( June 1963), the editors write "We have primarily included studies dealing with
economic and social relations, with a few excursions into the field of institutional or
cultural superstructures."
5. For example, the particularly hostile account given by J. Freund in L'es¬'
sence du politique (Paris: Editions Sirey, 1965), pp. 645ff. According to Freund,
political alienation for Marx is alienation supreme, absolute, and irretrievable.
6. Charles Seignobos wrote in 1924, in the preface to his Histoire politique

de l'Europe contemporaine, that we must "recognize the degree to which the

superficial phenomena of political life dominate the fundamental phenomena of
economic, intellectual, and social life" ( cited by Wolff, "L'etude des economies," p.
850).
7. "The problems of political history are as a rule immediately obvious." Johan
Huizinga, The Task of Cultural History, written in 1926, published in Dutch in 1929
and in English translation in Men and Ideas ( New York: Meridian Books, 1959), p. 27.
Again: "The historical forms of political life are already to be found in life itself.
Political history brings its own forms: a state institution, a peace treaty, a war, a
dynasty, the state itself. In this fact, which is inseparable from the paramount
im¬portance of those forms themselves, lies the fundamental character of political
history. It continues to enjoy a certain primacy because it is so much the morphology of
society par excellence." Ibid., pp. 58-59.
8. For example, in "The Political and Military Significance of Chivalric Ideas in
the Late Middle Ages," first published in French in Revue d'histoire diplomatique, 35
( 1921 ), 126-138, and translated into English in Men and Ideas. Huizinga writes ( pp.
196-197): "The medievalists of our day are hardly favorable to chivalry. Combing the
records, in which chivalry is, indeed, little mentioned, they have succeeded in
presenting a picture of the Middle Ages in which economic and social points of view
are so dominant that one tends at times to forget that, next to religion, chivalry was the
strongest of the ideas that filled the minds and hearts of those men of another age."
9. A. Touraine, Sociologie de l'action (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965 ), chap. VI,
"The Political System," p. 298. This two-fold fragility consists partly in the danger that
the study of political relationships may be absorbed by structural analysis on the one
hand and history on the other; partly in the fact that political theory may be subject
either to politics or to political philosophy, itself only a part of the philosophy of
history.
10. E. Morin, Introduction a une politique de l'homme (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1965 ), new ed., 1969, pp. 9-10: La politique en miettes.
11. In English the emergence of two terms, "policy" and "polity" ( in the
fourteenth century the French had tried out policie, also copied from the Greek, but it
did not take), complicated the field of political science and incidentally that of political
history. While the French philosophes of the eighteenth century sought, or accepted, a
compromise between philo-sophical and political history, it may be that in England an
even more radical dilemma caused an oscillation between historical and political, at
once linked and opposed to each other. This possibility seems suggested by such titles
as that published anonymously in London in 1706: An
Historical and Political Essay, Discussing the Affinity or Resemblance of the
Ancient and Modern Government. See J. A. W. Gunn, "The 'Civil Polity' of Peter
Paxton," Past and Present, 40 ( July 1968), 56.
12. The best example is the preface to the Etudes historiques (1831).

Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?

13. This approach was set out in the Cours d'histoire moderne: histoire de la
civilisation en Europe depuis la chute de l'Empire Romain jusqu'a la Revolution
Francaise ( 1828), lecture I. For long passages from Chateau-briand and Guizot, see J.
Ehrard and G. Palmade, L'histoire (Paris: Colin, 1969), pp. 189-193, 203-207.
14. R. Aron, "Thucydide et le recit historique," Theory and History, 1, no. 2
(1960), reprinted in Dimensions de la conscience historique (Paris: Plon, 1961), pp.
147-197.
15. As throughout this article, the works quoted on medieval history are meant
only as references and examples, not as a bibliography or selection in terms of merit.
16. Aron, "Thucydide et le recit historique," in Dimensions, p. 189.
17. An example of a traditional but all the same very pertinent study is F. M.
Powicke, "Reflections on the Medieval State," Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, ser. 4, XIX (1936). Among new approaches are: B. Guenee, "L'histoire de
l'etat en France a la fin du Moyen Age vue par les historiens francais depuis cent ans,"
Revue historique, 232 (1964), 331-380; "Etat et nation en France au Moyen Age," ibid.,
237 (1967), 17-30; "Espace et etat dans la France du bas Moyen Age," Annales:
economies, societes, civilisations ( 1968 ), pp. 744-758. It will be noted that the word
"power" (accompanied, it is true, by an adjective) occurs in the title of the pioneer work
by E. Lavisse, "Etude sur le pouvoir royal au temps de Charles V," Revue historique
(1884), pp. 233-280, which attempts to go beyond the description of institutions to
mental realities. Marc Bloch noted the connection between the history of the state and
the history of a nation or nations. "It seems to be difficult to separate the history of the
idea of the state from the history of the idea of nation, or patriotism." Revue historique,
128 (1918), 347.
18. The way Marxists tended to concentrate their interest on the state is apparent
from the titles of their works: for example, F. Engels, Private Property and the State; V.
I. Lenin, State and Revolution. On the two senses of "nation" in Marx and Engels ( the
modern designating "a kind of rising capitalism," and the other the more general Latin
sense of ethnic group) see A. Pelletier and J. J. Goblot, Materialisme historique et
histoire des civilisations (Paris: Editions sociales, 1969), pp. 94ff.
19. Marc Bloch, Mélanges d'histoire sociale (1944), p. 120, cited by Guenee,
"L'histoire de l'etat en France," p. 345.
20. Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, XIII, 3 vols. ( Stuttgart:
Hiersemann, 1954-1956).
21. P. E. Schramm summed up the position himself in the resume of his con-
tribution to the Rome Conference of 1955: "Die Staatsymbolik des Mittelalters," in X
Congresso Internazionale di Scienze storiche ( Rome, 1955), vol. VII, Riassunti delle
communicazioni, pp. 200-201.
22. M. Hellmann, ed. (Weimar: Biihlau, 1961). Among many studies on the

DiEDALTIS
symbolism of the crown in the Middle Ages, see pp. 336-383, "The Crown
as Fiction," in E. H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in
Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
23. "It is not by chance that the relic St. Louis brought to Paris and installed in the
chapel of his palace is a crown of thorns, doubly symbolic of king¬ship and of
sacrifice." Le Monde, April 29, 1970, p. 13.
24. Schramm, "Die Staatsymbolik des Mittelalters," pp. 200-201.
25. Robert Folz, L'idee d'empire en occident du Ve au XIVe siecles (Paris:
Aubier, 1953), p. 6.
26. On kingship in the early Middle Ages see especially J. M. Wallace-Hadrill,
The Long-Haired Kings (London: Methuen, 1962), and F. Graus, Volk, Herrscher and
Heiliger in Reich der Merowinger (Prague, 1965). For the Carolingian period, see the
recent study by W. Ullmann, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship
(London: Methuen, 1969), which brings out especially well (p. 17) how then, "in
conformity to and in accordance with the basic premisses of the ecclesiological theme
and the wholeness of view, there was no conceptual distinction between a Caro-lingian
State and a Carolingian Church." Georges Duby stressed the im-portance of the royal
model within the feudal system at the international symposium, Problemes de
stratification sociale, 1986, published by R. Mousnier, Publications of the Faculte des
Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Paris, Sorbonne, 'Recherches," XLIII (Paris, 1968).
See K. Gorski, "Le roi-saint: probleme d'ideologie feodale," Annales: economies,
soci&es, civilisations (1969), pp. 370-376.
27. Atti dell' VIII Congresso Internazionale di Storia delle religioni (Florence,
1956).
28. Studies in the History of Religions, supplements to NVMEN IV, The Sacral
Kingship: La Regalita Sacra (Leyden, 1959). Out of fifty-six con-tributions, only four
are devoted to the Middle Ages in the West: M. Maccarrone, "Il sovrano `Vicarius Dei'
nell'alto medio evo," pp. 581¬594; M. Murray, "The Divine King," pp. 595-608; L.
Rougier, "Le caractere sacre de la royaute en France," pp. 609-619; and J. A. Bizet, "La
notion du royaume interieur chez les mystiques germaniques du XIVe siecle," pp. 620-
626.
29. E. H. Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (Berlin: Bondi, 1927), and
Erganzungsband (Berlin: Bondi, 1931).
30. E. H. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and
Medieval Ruler Worship (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1946).
31. E. H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political
Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). See also the re¬views by R.
W. Southern in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 10 (1957), and B. Smalley in Past
and Present, no. 20 (November 1961).

Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?

32. Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1890), part
I: "The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings." Frazer, Lectures on the Early History
of Kingship (London: Macmillan, 1905).
33. A medievalist, Joseph R. Strayer, wrote an essay on "The Historian's Con-cept
of Public Opinion" in the collection edited by M. Komarovsky, Com-mon Frontiers of
the Social Sciences ( Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957). Marvin B. Becker, "Dante and
His Literary Contemporaries as Political Men," Speculum (1966), p. 674, n. 28, calls
attention to "the neglected theme of the language and imagery of medieval politics,"
and quotes the article by E. H. Kantorowicz, "Christus-Fiscus," in Synopsis: Festgabe
fiir Alfred Weber (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1948), pp. 225-235.
34. "Anthropologie politique" is the title of an informative essay by Georges
Balandier, 1967. He sets out systematically what E. R. Leach has observed to be
"contradictory, conflictual, approximate, and externally relative" in societies,
developing the theme of E. E. Evans-Pritchard in "Anthropology and History," 1961.
35. Here again there is an incompatibility between the point of view of Freund,
L'essence du politique, p. 538, according to which "the class struggle is only an aspect
of the political struggle," and the Marxist point of view, according to which all forms
of political struggle derive from the class struggle. As long as it is not applied too
dogmatically and inflexibly, I think the Marxist view is the truer and more fruitful. G.
Cracco's stimulating book, Societd e Stato nel medievo veneziano (secoli XII-XIV )
( Florence: Olschki, 1967), shows the class struggle functioning normally in the
political history of Venice, usually thought to be a world apart. It may be thought,
however, that the author is limited by an approach based too much on the idea of the
state. F. C. Lane makes reservations of this kind in a generally appreciative review in
Speculum (1968), pp. 497-501.
36. See especially K. Rosl, "Potens und Pauper: Begriffgeschichtliche Studien zur
gesellschaftlichen Differenzierung im friihen Mittelalter und zum `Pauperismus' des
Hochmittelalter," in Alteuropa und die moderne Gesell-schaft: Festschrift fiir Otto
Brunner (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1963), pp. 60-87, reprinted in
Friihformen der Gesellschaft im mittel¬alterlichen Europa (Munich-Vienna:
Oldenbourg, 1964), pp. 106-134. Also J. Le Goff, "Le vocabulaire des categories
sociales chez Saint Francois d'Assise et ses premiers biographes," in the international
symposium or¬ganized by the Ecole Normale Superieure of Saint-Cloud, 1967, on the
vocabulary of social classes (in press).
37. G. Duby's conception of seigneurie banale is set out in his thesis, La socióte
aux XIe et XIIe siecles dans la region maconnaise (Paris: Colin, 1953), and in
L'Oconomie rurale et la vie des compagnes dans l'Occident medieval (Paris: Aubier,
1962), vol. II, bk. III, "XI-XIIIe siecles: la seigneurie et l'economie rurale." In the
legally oriented series, the Recueils de la Societe Jean Bodin, the volume Gouvernants
et Gouvernes, XXV (1965), shows a preoccupation with the themes of power which
may

DiEDALUS
derive from Marc Bloch, La societó feodale (Paris: Michel, 1939), vol. II, bk. 2, "Le
gouvernement des hommes." The theme also occurs in J. Dhondt, " `Ordres' ou
`puissances': l'exemple des etats de Flandre," Annales: economies, societes,
civilisations (1950), pp. 289-305.
38. See H. Grundmann, "Litteratus-Illitteratus: Der Wandlung einer Bildungs-
norm vom Altertum zum Mittelalter," Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte, 40 (1958), and his
"Sacerdotium-Regnum-Studium: zur Wertung der Wissen-schaft im 13. Jahrhundert,"
Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte, 34 (1951).
39. See my Les intellectuels au Moyen Age (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957), for
an attempt to show how, between the end of the twelfth and the four-teenth century,
members of the universities moved from a socioprofessional position which was
corporative to one which placed them among the possessors of power.
40. The subject proposed by the French delegation to the International Uni-versity
Committee on History at the Thirteenth International Conference on Historical
Sciences in Moscow, August 1970. I believe Professor Lawrence Stone has a similar
project in mind for English universities in the modern era. This revival of interest in the
prosopographical method, a method of social history likely to favor the renewal of
political history, is evident in various sectors (see the late 1970 number of Annales:
economies, societes, civilisations).
41. Among G. Dumezil's many fascinating studies on the tri-functional ideology
of the Indo-Europeans, one of the most recent is Idees romaines (Paris: Gallimard,
1969), in which he poses various questions about western Europe in the Middle Ages.
Two examples of initial research in this field are J. Batany, "Des 'Trois Fonctions' aux
'Trois Etats'?" Annales: economies, societes, civilisations (1936), pp. 933-938, and J.
Le Goff, "Note sur societe tripartie, ideologie monarchique et renouveau economique
dans la chretiente du IXe au XIIe siecle," in T. Manteuffel and A. Gieysztor, eds.,
L'Europe aux IX-XIe siecles (Warsaw, 1968), pp. 63-71.
42. One of the works inspired by this particular question is Joan Evans' inter-
esting Art in Medieval France, 987-1498: A Study in Patronage ( London: Oxford
University Press, 1948).
43. E. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism ( New York: Meridian,
1957). A more traditional view is given in R. Branner, St. Louis and the Court Style in
Gothic Architecture (London: Zwemmer, 1965).
44. On the significance of Botticelli's Primavera see P. Francastel, La realite
figurative (Paris: Gonthier, 1965), p. 241, "La fete mythologique au Quattrocentro,"
and p. 272, "Un mythe politique et social du Quattrocento." See Ernst Gombrich,
Botticelli's Mythologies: A Study of the Neoplatonic Symbolism of Its Circle, in
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti¬tutes (1945). P. Francastel has developed
these ideas in La figure et le lieu: l'ordre visuel du Quattrocento (Paris: Gallimard, 1967
).
45. See R. Manselli, L'eresia del male ( Naples: Morano, 1963), and "Les 18

Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?

heretiques dans la societe italieene du XIIIe siecle," in HOrgsies et sociótes dans
l'Europe prg-industrielle, Xle-XVIIIe siêcles, a Royaumont symposium, presented by J.
Le Goff (Paris and The Hague, 1968), pp. 199-202. This points out the "very close link
between the Catharist heresy and the great political party of the Ghibellines." This
study needs to be developed in the direction of a sociological comparison between
religious sect and political party.
46. I will limit myself to references to the international symposium in Amster-
dam in 1967, "Urban Core and Inner City"; Nelson W. Polsby, Com-munity Power and
Political Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); and the "anti-historicist"
works of Manuel Castells, which include "Le centre urbain: projet de recherche
sociologique," in Cahiers inter-nationaux de sociologie (1969), pp. 83-106, and "Vers
une theorie sociologique de la planification urbaine," in Sociologie du travail (1969),
pp. 414-443. All these deal with the modern period.
47. W. Braunfels, Mittelalterliche Stadtbaukunst der Toskana (Berlin, 1953).
48. See especially the preface to F. Braudel, La Mgcliterranie et le monde
maiterraneen d repoque de Philippe II (Paris: Colin, 1949), revised and augmented 2d
ed., 1966; the idea is repeated in Ecrits sur rhistoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), pp. 11-
13.
49. L. Febvre, Combats pour l'histoire (Paris: Colin, 1953), p. 118 (written in
1947).
50. Ibid., p. 20 (written in 1941).

From Social History to the History

 of Society

E. J. HOBSBAWM

THIS ESSAY is an attempt to observe and analyze, not to state a

personal credo or to express (except where this is clearly stated) the
author's preferences and value judgments. I say this at the outset in order
to distinguish this essay from others which are defenses of or pleas for
the kind of history practiced by their authors—as it happens social
history does not need either at the moment—but also to avoid two
misunderstandings especially common in discussions heavily charged
with ideology. All discussions about social history are.
The first is the tendency for readers to identify authors with the views
they write about, unless they disclaim this identification in the clearest
terms and sometimes even when they do so. The second is the tendency
to confuse the ideological or political motivations of research, or its
utilization, with its scientific value. Where ideological intention or bias
produces triviality or error, as is often the case in the human sciences,
we may happily condemn motivation, method, and result. However, life
would be a great deal simpler if our understanding of history were
advanced exclusively by those with whom we are in agreement or in
sympathy on all public and even private matters. Social history is at
present in fashion. None of those who practice it would care to be seen
keeping ideological company with all those who come under the same
historical heading. Nevertheless, what is more important than to define
one's attitude is to discover where social history stands today after two
decades of unsystematic if copious development, and whither it might
go.
I
The term social history has always been difficult to define, and until
recently there has been no great pressure to define it, for it has lacked the
institutional and professional vested interests which normally insist on
precise demarcations. Broadly speaking, until the present vogue of the
subject—or at least of the name—it was in the past used in three
sometimes overlapping senses. First, it referred to the history of the poor
or lower classes, and more specifically to the history of the movements
of the poor ("social movements"). The term could be even more
specialized, referring essentially to the history of labor and socialist
ideas and organizations. For obvious reasons this link between social
history and the history of social protest or socialist movements has
remained strong. A number of social historians have been attracted to the
subject because they were radicals or socialists and as such interested in
subjects of great sentimental relevance to them.'
Second, the term was used to refer to works on a variety of human
activities difficult to classify except in such terms as "man-ners,
customs, everyday life." This was, perhaps for linguistic rea-sons, a
largely Anglo-Saxon usage, since the English language lacks suitable
terms for what the Germans who wrote about similar sub-jects—often
also in a rather superficial and journalistic manner— called Kultur- or
Sittengeschichte. This kind of social history was not particularly oriented
toward the lower classes—indeed rather the opposite—though the more
politically radical practitioners tended to pay attention to them. It formed
the unspoken basis of what may be called the residual view of social
history, which was put forward by the late G. M. Trevelyan in his
English Social History ( London, 1944) as "history with the politics left
out." It requires no comment.
The third meaning of the term was certainly the most common and for
our purposes the most relevant: "social" was used in com-bination with
"economic history." Indeed, outside the Anglo- Saxon world, the title of
the typical specialist journal in this field before the Second World War
always ( I think) bracketed the two words, as in the Vierteljahrschrift
fuer Sozial u. Wirtschaftsgeschi¬chte, the Revue d'Histoire E. & S., or
the Annales d'Histoire E. & S. It must be admitted that the economic half
of this combination was overwhelmingly preponderant. There were
hardly any social histories of equivalent caliber to set beside the
numerous volumes devoted to the economic history of various countries,
periods, and subjects. There were in fact not very many economic and
social histories. Before 1939 one can think of only a few such works,
admittedly sometimes by impressive authors (Pirenne, Mikhail
Rostovtzeff, J. W. Thompson, perhaps Dopsch ), and the mono-

graphic or periodical literature was even sparser. Nevertheless, the

habitual bracketing of economic and social, whether in the definitions of
the general field of historical specialization or under the more
specialized banner of economic history, is significant.
It revealed the desire for an approach to history systemati¬cally
different from the classical Rankean one. What interested historians of
this kind was the evolution of the economy, and this in turn interested
them because of the light it threw on the struc¬ture and changes in
society, and more especially on the relation¬ship between classes and
social groups, as George Unwin ad¬mitted.2 This social dimension is
evident even in the work of the most narrowly or cautiously economic
historians so long as they claimed to be historians. Even J. H. Clapham
argued that economic history was of all varieties of history the most
fundamental be¬cause it was the foundation of society. The
predominance of the economic over the social in this combination had,
we may suggest, two reasons. It was partly owing to a view of economic
theory which refused to isolate the economic from social, institutional,
and other elements, as with the Marxists and the German historical
school, and partly to the sheer headstart of economics over the other
social sciences. If history had to be integrated into the social sciences,
economics was the one it had primarily to come to terms with. One
might go further and argue ( with Marx) that, whatever the essential
inseparability of the economic and the social in human society, the
analytical base of any historical inquiry into the evolu¬tion of human
societies must be the process of social production.
None of the three versions of social history produced a spe-cialized
academic field of social history until the 1950's, though at one time the
famous Annales of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch dropped the
economic half of its subtitle and proclaimed itself purely social.
However, this was a temporary diversion of the war years, and the title
by which this great journal has now been known for a quarter of a
century—Anna/es: economies, soci6tes, civilisations—as well as the
nature of its contents, reflect the origi¬nal and essentially global and
comprehensive aims of its founders. Neither the subject itself, nor the
discussion of its problems, de¬veloped seriously before 1950. The
journals specializing in it, still few in number, were not founded until the
end of the 1950's: we may perhaps regard the Comparative Studies in
Society and His¬tory ( 1958) as the first. As an academic specialization,
social history is therefore quite new.
 Social History to the History of Society
What explains the rapid development and growing emancipa¬tion of
social history in the past twenty years? The question could be answered
in terms of technical and institutional changes within the academic
disciplines of social science: the deliberate speciali¬zation of economic
history to fit in with the requirements of the rapidly developing
economic theory and analysis, of which the "new economic history" is
an example; the remarkable and world¬wide growth of sociology as an
academic subject and fashion, which in turn called for subsidiary
historical service-branches analogous to those required by economics
departments. We cannot neglect such factors. Many historians ( such as
the Marxists) who had previously labeled themselves economic because
the prob¬lems they were interested in were plainly not encouraged or
even considered by orthodox general history, found themselves
ex¬truded from a rapidly narrowing economic history and accepted or
welcomed the title of "social historians," especially if their
mathe¬matics were poor. It is improbable whether in the atmosphere of
the 1950's and early 1960's someone like R. H. Tawney would have been
welcomed among the economic historians had he been a young
researcher and not president of the Economic History Society. However,
such academic redefinitions and professional shifts hardly explain much,
though they cannot be overlooked.
Far more significant was the general historization of the social
sciences which took place during this period, and may retrospec-tively
appear to have been the most important development within them at this
time. For my present purpose it is not necessary to explain this change,
but it is impossible to avoid drawing attention to the immense
significance of the revolutions and struggles for political and economic
emancipation of colonial and semicolonial countries, which drew the
attention of governments, international and research organizations, and
consequently also of social sci-entists, to what are essentially problems
of historic transforma¬tions. These were subjects which had hitherto
been outside, or at best on the margins of, academic orthodoxy in the
social sciences, and had increasingly been neglected by historians.
At all events essentially historical questions and concepts ( some-
times, as in the case of "modernization" or "economic growth,"
excessively crude concepts) have captured even the discipline hitherto
most immune to history, when not actually, like Rad¬cliffe-Brown's
social anthropology, actively hostile to it. This pro¬gressive infiltration
of history is perhaps most evident in economics,

where an initial field of growth economics, whose assumptions,

though much more sophisticated, were those of the cookery book ("Take
the following quantities of ingredients a through n, mix and cook, and
the result will be the take-off into self-sustained growth"), has been
succeeded by the growing realization that factors outside economics also
determine economic development. In brief, it is now impossible to
pursue many activities of the social scientist in any but a trivial manner
without coming to terms with social structure and its transformations:
without the history of societies. It is a curious paradox that the
economists were begin¬ning to grope for some understanding of social
( or at any rate not strictly economic) factors at the very moment when
the economic historians, absorbing the economists' models of fifteen
years earlier, were trying to make themselves look hard rather than soft
by for¬getting about everything except equations and statistics.
What can we conclude from this brief glance at the historical
development of social history? It can hardly be an adequate guide to the
nature and tasks of the subject under consideration, though it can explain
why certain more or less heterogeneous subjects of research came to be
loosely grouped under this general title, and how developments in other
social sciences prepared the ground for the establishment of an academic
theory specially demarcated as such. At most it can provide us with
some hints, at least one of which is worth mentioning immediately.
A survey of social history in the past seems to show that its best
practitioners have always felt uncomfortable with the term itself. They
have either, like the great Frenchmen to whom we owe so much,
preferred to describe themselves simply as historians and their aim as
"total" or "global" history, or as men who sought to integrate the
contributions of all relevant social sciences in history, rather than to
exemplify any one of them. Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Georges
Lefebvre are not names which can be pigeon¬holed as social historians
except insofar as they accepted Fustel de Coulanges' statement that
"History is not the accumulation of events of all kinds which occurred in
the past. It is the science of human societies."
Social history can never be another specialization like economic or
other hyphenated histories because its subject matter cannot be isolated.
We can define certain human activities as economic, at least for
analytical purposes, and then study them historically. Though this may
be ( except for certain definable purposes ) artifi

Social History to the History of Society

cial or unrealistic, it is not impracticable. In much the same way,
though at a lower level of theory, the old kind of intellectual history
which isolated written ideas from their human context and traced their
filiation from one writer to another is possible, if one wants to do that
sort of thing. But the social or societal aspects of man's being cannot be
separated from the other aspects of his being, ex-cept at the cost of
tautology or extreme trivialization. They cannot, for more than a
moment, be separated from the ways in which men get their living and
their material environment. They cannot, even for a moment, be
separated from their ideas, since their relations with one another are
expressed and formulated in language which implies concepts as soon as
they open their mouths. And so on. The intellectual historian may ( at his
risk) pay no attention to economics, the economic historian to
Shakespeare, but the social historian who neglects either will not get far.
Conversely, while it is extremely improbable that a monograph on
provencal poetry will be economic history or one on inflation in the
sixteenth cen¬tury intellectual history, both could be treated in a way to
make them social history.
II
Let us turn from the past to the present and consider the prob-lems of
writing the history of society. The first question concerns how much
societal historians can get from other social sciences, or indeed how far
their subject is or ought to be merely the science of society insofar as it
deals with the past. This question is natural, though the experience of the
past two decades suggests two dif-ferent answers to it. It is clear that
social history has since 1950 been powerfully shaped and stimulated, not
only by the profes¬sional structure of other social sciences ( for
example, their specific course requirements for university students ), and
by their methods and techniques, but also by their questions. It is hardly
too much to say that the recent efflorescence of studies in the British
indus¬trial revolution, a subject once grossly neglected by its own
experts because they doubted the validity of the concept of industrial
revo-lution, is due primarily to the urge of economists ( doubtless in turn
echoing that of governments and planners) to discover how industrial
revolutions happen, what makes them happen, and what sociopolitical
consequences they have. With certain notable excep-tions, the flow of
stimulation in the past twenty years has been one

way. On the other hand, if we look at recent developments in another

way, we shall be struck by the obvious convergence of workers from
different disciplines toward sociohistorical problems. The study of
millennial phenomena is a case in point, since among writers on these
subjects we find men coming from anthropology, sociology, political
science, history, not to mention students of literature and religions—
though not, so far as I am aware, econo-mists. We also note the transfer
of men with other professional formations, at least temporarily, to work
which historians would consider historical—as with Charles Tilly and
Neil Smelser from sociology, Eric Wolf from anthropology, Everett
Hagen and Sir John Hicks from economics.
Yet the second tendency is perhaps best regarded not as con-vergence
but as conversion. For it must never be forgotten that if nonhistorical
social scientists have begun to ask properly historical questions and to
ask historians for answers, it is because they themselves have none. And
if they have sometimes turned them-selves into historians, it is because
the practicing members of our discipline, with the notable exception of
the Marxists and others— not necessarily Marxisants—who accept a
similar problematic, have not provided the answers.5 Moreover, though
there are now a few social scientists from other disciplines who have
made themselves sufficiently expert in our field to command respect,
there are more who have merely applied a few crude mechanical
concepts and models. For every Vendee by a Tilly, there are, alas,
several dozen equivalents of Rostow's Stages. I leave aside the numerous
others who have ventured into the difficult territory of historical source
material without an adequate knowledge of the hazards they are likely to
encounter there, or of the means of avoiding and over¬coming them. In
brief, the situation at present is one in which his¬torians, with all their
willingness to learn from other disciplines, are required to teach rather
than to learn. The history of society cannot be written by applying the
meager available models from other sciences; it requires the construction
of adequate new ones— or, at least ( Marxists would argue), the
development of existing sketches into models.
This is not, of course, true of techniques and methods, where the
historians are already net debtors to a substantial extent, and will, or at
least ought, to go even more heavily and systematically into debt. I do
not wish to discuss this aspect of the problem of the history of society,
but a point or two can be made in passing. Given

Social History to the History of Society

the nature of our sources, we can hardly advance much beyond a
combination of the suggestive hypothesis and the apt anecdotal
illustration without the techniques for the discovery, the statistical
grouping, and handling of large quantities of data, where necessary with
the aid of division of research labor and technological devices, which
other social sciences have long developed. At the opposite extreme, we
stand in equal need of the techniques for the observa-tion and analysis in
depth of specific individuals, small groups, and situations, which have
also been pioneered outside history, and which may be adaptable to our
purposes—for example, the partici-pant observation of the social
anthropologists, the interview-in-depth, perhaps even psychoanalytical
methods. At the very least these various techniques can stimulate the
search for adaptations and equivalents in our field, which may help to
answer otherwise im-penetrable questions.6
I am much more doubtful about the prospect of turning social history
into a backward projection of sociology, as of turning eco-nomic history
into retrospective economic theory, because these disciplines do not at
present provide us with useful models or analytical frameworks for the
study of long-run historical socio-economic transformations. Indeed the
bulk of their thinking has not been concerned with, or even interested in,
such changes, if we except such trends as Marxism. Moreover, it may be
argued that in important respects their analytical models have been
developed systematically, and most profitably, by abstracting from
historical change. This is notably true, I would suggest, of sociology and
social anthropology.
The founding fathers of sociology have indeed been more his-
torically minded than the main school of neoclassic economics ( though
not necessarily than the original school of classical political
economists ), but theirs is an altogether less developed science. Stanley
Hoffmann has rightly pointed to the difference between the "models" of
the economists and the "checklists" of the sociologists and
anthropologists.' Perhaps they are more than mere checklists. These
sciences have also provided us with certain visions, patterns of possible
structures composed of elements which can be permuted and combined
in various ways, vague analogues to Kekule's ring glimpsed at the top of
the bus, but with the drawback of unverifia¬bility. At their best such
structural-functional patterns may be both elegant and heuristically
useful, at least for some. At a more modest

level, they may provide us with useful metaphors, concepts, or terms (

such as "role"), or convenient aids in ordering our material.
Moreover, quite apart from their deficiency as models, it may be
argued that the theoretical constructions of sociology ( or social
anthropology) have been most successful by excluding history, that is,
directional or oriented change.8 Broadly speaking, the structural-
functional patterns illuminate what societies have in common in spite of
their differences, whereas our problem is with what they have not. It is
not what light Levi-Strauss's Amazonian tribes can throw on modern
( indeed on any) society, but on how humanity got from the cavemen to
modern industrialism or postindustrialism, and what changes in society
were associated with this progress, or necessary for it to take place, or
consequential upon it. Or, to use another illustration, it is not to observe
the permanent necessity of all human societies to supply themselves with
food by growing or otherwise acquiring it, but what happens when this
function, having been overwhelmingly fulfilled ( since the neolithic
revolution) by classes of peasants forming the majority of their societies,
comes to be fulfilled by small groups of other kinds of agricultural
producers and may come to be fulfilled in nonagricultural ways. How
does this happen and why? I do not believe that sociology and social
anthropology, however helpful they are incidentally, at present provide
us with much guidance.
On the other hand, while I remain skeptical of most current economic
theory as a framework of the historical analysis of societies ( and
therefore of the claims of the new economic history ), I am inclined to
think that the possible value of economics for the histor-ian of society is
great. It cannot but deal with what is an essentially dynamic element in
history, namely the process—and, speaking globally and on a long time-
scale, progress—of social production. Insofar as it does this it has, as
Marx saw, historical development built into it. To take a simple
illustration: the concept of the "eco-nomic surplus," which the late Paul
Baran revived and utilized to such good effect') is patently fundamental
to any historian of the development of societies, and strikes me as not
only more objective and quantifiable, but also more primary, speaking in
terms of analysis, than, say, the dichotomy Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft.
Of course Marx knew that economic models, if they are to be valuable
for historical analysis, cannot be divorced from social and institu¬tional
realities, which include certain basic types of human com¬munal or
kinship organization, not to mention the structures and

Social History to the History of Society

assumptions specific to particular socioeconomic formations or cul-
tures. And yet, though Marx is not for nothing regarded as one of the
major founding fathers of modern sociological thought ( directly and
through his followers and critics), the fact remains that his major
intellectual project Das Kapital took the form of a work of economic
analysis. We are required neither to agree with his con-clusions nor his
methodology. But we would be unwise to neglect the practice of the
thinker who, more than any other, has defined or suggested the set of
historical questions to which social scientists find themselves drawn
today.
III
How are we to write the history of society? It is not possible for me to
produce a definition or model of what we mean by society here, or even
a checklist of what we want to know about its history. Even if I could, I
do not know how profitable this would be. How-ever, it may be useful to
put up a small and miscellaneous assort¬ment of signposts to direct or
warn off future traffic.
( 1) The history of society is history; that is to say it has real
chronological time as one of its dimensions. We are concerned not only
with structures and their mechanisms of persistence and change, and
with the general possibilities and patterns of their transformations, but
also with what actually happened. If we are not, then ( as Fernand
Braudel has reminded us in his article on "Histoire et Longue Duree"
10 ) we are not historians. Conjectural history has a place in our
discipline, even though its chief value is to help us assess the
possibilities of present and future, rather than past, where its place is
taken by comparative history; but actual history is what we must explain.
The possible development or nondevelopment of capitalism in imperial
China is relevant to us only insofar as it helps to explain the actual fact
that this type of economy developed fully, at least to begin with, in one
and only one region of the world. This in turn may be usefully contrasted
( again in the light of general models) with the tendency for other
systems of social relations—for example, the broadly feudal—to
develop much more frequently and in a greater number of areas. The
history of society is thus a collaboration between general models of
social structure and change and the specific set of phenomena which
ac¬tually occurred. This is true whatever the geographical or
chrono¬logical scale of our inquiries.

DADALUS
( 2 ) The history of society is, among other things, that of specific
units of people living together and definable in sociological terms. It is
the history of societies as well as of human society ( as distinct from,
say, that of apes and ants), or of certain types of society and their
possible relationships ( as in such terms as "bour¬geois" or "pastoral"
society), or of the general development of humanity considered as a
whole. The definition of a society in this sense raises difficult questions,
even if we assume that we are de¬fining an objective reality, as seems
likely, unless we reject as illegit¬imate such statements as "Japanese
society in 1930 differed from English society." For even if we eliminate
the confusions between different uses of the word "society," we face
problems ( a ) because the size, complexity, and scope of these units
varies, for example, at different historical periods or stages of
development; and ( b ) because what we call society is merely one set of
human interrela¬tions among several of varying scale and
comprehensiveness into which people are classifiable or classify
themselves, often simultane¬ously and with overlaps. In extreme cases
such as New Guinea or Amazon tribes, these various sets may define the
same group of people, though this is in fact rather improbable, But
normally this group is congruent neither with such relevant sociological
units as the community, nor with certain wider systems of relationship of
which the society forms a part, and which may be functionally essential
to it ( like the set of economic relations ) or nonessential ( like those of
culture ).
 Christendom or Islam exist and are recognized as self-classifi-cations,
but though they may define a class of societies sharing certain common
characteristics, they are not societies in the sense in which we use the
word when talking about the Greeks or modern Sweden. On the other
hand, while in many ways Detroit and Cuzco are today part of a single
system of functional interrelationships ( for example, part of one
economic system ), few would regard them as part of the same society,
sociologically speaking. Neither would we regard as one the societies of
the Romans or the Han and those of the barbarians who formed, quite
evidently, part of a wider system of interrelationships with them. How
do we define these units? It is far from easy to say, though most of us
solve—or evade— the problem by choosing some outside criterion:
territorial, ethnic, political, or the like. But this is not always satisfactory.
The problem is more than methodological. One of the major themes of
the history of modern societies is the increase in their scale, internal
homo

Social History to the History of Society

geneity, or at least in the centralization and directness of social
relationships, the change from an essentially pluralist to an essen¬tially
unitary structure. In tracing this, problems of definition be¬come very
troublesome, as every student of the development of national societies or
at least of nationalisms knows.
( 3) The history of societies requires us to apply, if not a formalized
and elaborate model of such structures, then at least an approximate
order of research priorities and a working assumption about what
constitutes the central nexus or complex of connections of our subject,
though of course these things imply a model. Every social historian does
in fact make such assumptions and hold such priorities. Thus I doubt
whether any historian of eighteenth-century Brazil would give the
Catholicism of that society analytical priority over its slavery, or any
historian of nineteenth-century Britain would regard kinship as central a
social nexus as he would in Anglo-Saxon England.
A tacit consensus among historians seems to have established a fairly
common working model of this kind, with variants. One starts with the
material and historical environment, goes on to the forces and techniques
of production ( demography coming some¬where in between), the
structure of the consequent economy— divisions of labor, exchange,
accumulation, distribution of the sur¬plus, and so forth—and the social
relations arising from these. These might be followed by the institutions
and the image of so¬ciety and its functioning which underlie them. The
shape of the social structure is thus established, the specific
characteristics and details of which, insofar as they derive from other
sources, can then be determined, most likely by comparative study. The
practice is thus to work outwards and upwards from the process of social
pro¬duction in its specific setting. Historians will be tempted—in my
view rightly—to pick on one particular relation or relational com¬plex
as central and specific to the society ( or type of society) in question, and
to group the rest of the treatment around it—for example, Bloch's
"relations of interdependence" in his Feudal Society, or those arising out
of industrial production, possibly in industrial society, certainly in its
capitalist form. Once the structure has been established, it must be seen
in its historical movement. In the French phrase "structure" must be seen
in "conjuncture," though this term must not be taken to exclude other,
and possibly more relevant, forms and patterns of historical change.
Once again the tendency is to treat economic movements ( in the
broadest

sense) as the backbone of such an analysis. The tensions to which the

society is exposed in the process of historic change and trans-formation
then allow the historian to expose (1) the general mechanism by which
the structures of society simultaneously tend to lose and reestablish their
equilibria, and ( 2) the phenomena which are traditionally the subject of
interest to the social his¬torians, for example, collective consciousness,
social movements, the social dimension of intellectual and cultural
changes, and so on.
My object in summarizing what I believe—perhaps wrongly— to be a
widely accepted working plan of social historians is not to recommend
it, even though I am personally in its favor. It is rather the opposite: to
suggest that we try and make the implicit assump-tions on which we
work explicit and to ask ourselves whether this plan is in fact the best for
the formulation of the nature and struc¬ture of societies and the
mechanisms of their historic transforma¬tions ( or stabilizations ),
whether other plans of work based on other questions can be made
compatible with it, or are to be pre¬ferred to it, or can simply be
superimposed to produce the his¬torical equivalent of those Picasso
portraits which are simultane¬ously displayed full-face and in profile.
In brief, if as historians of society we are to help in producing— for
the benefit of all the social sciences—valid models of socio-historic
dynamics, we shall have to establish a greater unity of our practice and
our theory, which at the present stage of the game probably means in the
first instance to watch what we are doing, to generalize it, and to correct
it in the light of the problems arising out of further practice.
IV
Consequently, I should like to conclude by surveying the actual
practice of social history in the past decade or two, in order to see what
future approaches and problems it suggests. This procedure has the
advantage that it fits in both with the professional inclina¬tions of a
historian and with what little we know about the actual progress of
sciences. What topics and problems have attracted most attention in
recent years? What are the growing-points? What are the interesting
people doing? The answers to such questions do not exhaust analysis,
but without them we cannot get very far. The consensus of workers may
be mistaken, or distorted by fashion or— as is obviously the case in such
a field as the study of public disorder

Social History to the History of Society

—by the impact of politics and administrative requirements, but we
neglect it at our peril. The progress of science has derived less from the
attempt to define perspectives and programs a priori—if it did we should
now be curing cancer—than from an obscure and often simultaneous
convergence upon the questions worth asking and, above all, those ripe
for an answer. Let us see what has been happening, at least insofar as it
is reflected in the impressionistic view of one observer.
Let me suggest that the bulk of interesting work in social history in
the past ten or fifteen years has clustered around the following topics or
complexes of questions:
( 1) Demography and kinship
( 2) Urban studies insofar as these fall within our field
(3) Classes and social groups
( 4 ) The history of "mentalities" or collective consciousness or of
"culture" in the anthropologists' sense
( 5) The transformation of societies ( for example, moderniza¬tion or
industrialization )
(6) Social movements and phenomena of social protest.
The first two groups can be singled out because they have al¬ready
institutionalized themselves as fields, regardless of the im¬portance of
their subject matter, and now possess their own organ¬ization,
methodology, and system of publications. Historical demog¬raphy is a
rapidly growing and fruitful field, which rests not so much on a set of
problems as on a technical innovation in research ( family reconstitution)
that makes it possible to derive interesting results from material hitherto
regarded as recalcitrant or exhausted ( parish registers ). It has thus
opened a new range of sources, whose characteristics in turn have led to
the formulation of questions. The major interest for social historians of
historical demography lies in the light it sheds on certain aspects of
family structure and behav¬ior, on the life-curves of people at different
periods, and on inter- generational changes. These are important though
limited by the nature of the sources—more limited than the most
enthusiastic champions of the subject allow, and certainly by themselves
in-sufficient to provide the framework of analysis of "The World We
Have Lost." Nevertheless, the fundamental importance of this field is not
in question, and it has served to encourage the use of strict quantitative
techniques. One welcome effect—or side effect— has been to arouse a
greater interest in historical problems of

kinship structure than social historians might have shown without this
stimulus, though a modest demonstration effect from social
anthropology ought not to be neglected. The nature and prospects of this
field have been sufficiently debated to make further dis¬cussion
unnecessary here.
Urban history also possesses a certain technologically deter¬mined
unity. The individual city is normally a geographically lim¬ited and
coherent unit, often with its specific documentation and even more often
of a size which lends itself to research on the Ph.D. scale. It also reflects
the urgency of urban problems which have increasingly become the
major, or at least the most dramatic, problems of social planning and
management in modern industrial societies. Both these influences tend to
make urban history a large container with ill-defined, heterogeneous,
and sometimes indis¬criminate contents. It includes anything about
cities. But it is clear that it raises problems peculiarly germane to social
history, at least in the sense that the city can never be an analytical
framework for economic macrohistory (because economically it must be
part of a larger system ), and politically it is only rarely found as a self-
contained city state. It is essentially a body of human beings living
together in a particular way, and the characteristic process of
urbanization in modern societies makes it, at least up to the pres¬ent, the
form in which most of them live together. The technical, social, and
political problems of the city arise essentially out of the interactions of
masses of human beings living in close proximity to one another; and
even the ideas about the city ( insofar as it is not a mere stage-set for the
display of some ruler's power and glory) are those in which men—from
the Book of Revelation on—have tried to express their aspirations about
human communities. Moreover, in recent centuries it has raised and
dramatized the problems of rapid social change more than any other
institution, That the social his¬torians who have flocked into urban
studies are aware of this need hardly be said.11 One may say that they
have been groping toward a view of urban history as a paradigm of
social change. I doubt whether it can be this, at least for the period up to
the present. I also doubt whether many really impressive global studies
of the larger cities of the industrial era have so far been produced,
con¬sidering the vast quantity of work in this field. However, urban
history must remain a central concern of historians of society, if only
because it brings out—or can bring out—those specific aspects

Social History to the History of Society

of societal change and structure with which sociologists and social
psychologists are peculiarly concerned.
The other clusters of concentration have not so far been insti-
tutionalized, though one or two may be approaching this stage of
development. The history of classes and social groups has plainly
developed out of the common assumption that no understanding of
society is possible without an understanding of the major com-ponents
of all societies no longer based primarily on kinship. In no field has the
advance been more dramatic and—given the neglect of historians in the
past—more necessary. The briefest list of the most significant works in
social history must include Lawrence Stone on the Elizabethan
aristocracy, E. Le Roy Ladurie on the Languedoc peasants, Edward
Thompson on the making of the En¬glish working class, Adeline
Daumard on the Parisian bourgeoisie; but these are merely peaks in what
is already a sizeable mountain range. Compared to these the study of
more restricted social groups—professions, for instance—has been less
significant.
The novelty of the enterprise has been its ambition. Classes, or
specific relations of production such as slavery, are today being
systematically considered on the scale of a society, or in inter- societal
comparison, or as general types of social relationship. They are also now
considered in depth, that is, in all aspects of their social existence,
relations, and behavior. This is new, and the achievements are already
striking, though the work has barely begun—if we except fields of
specially intense activity, such as the comparative study of slavery.
Nevertheless, a number of difficulties can be discerned, and a few words
about them may not be out of place.
(1) The mass and variety of material for these studies is such that the
preindustrial artisan technique of older historians is plainly inadequate.
They require cooperative teamwork and the utilization of modern
technical equipment. I would guess that the massive works of individual
scholarship will mark the early phases of this kind of research, but will
give way on the one hand to systematic cooperative projects ( such as
the projected study of the Stockholm working class in the nineteenth
century )1'2 and on the other hand to periodic ( and probably still single-
handed) attempts at syn¬thesis. This is evident in the field of work with
which I am most familiar, the history of the working class. Even the
most ambitious single work—E. P. Thompson's—is no more than a great
torso, though it deals with a rather short period. ( Jurgen Kuczynski's

titanic Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter unter dem Kapitalismus,

as its title implies, concentrates only on certain aspects of the
work¬ing class.)
( 2) The field raises daunting technical difficulties, even where
conceptual clarity exists, especially as regards the measurement of
change over time—for example, the flow into and out of any spe-cified
social group, or the changes in peasant landholdings. We may be lucky
enough to have sources from which such changes can be derived ( for
example, the recorded genealogies of the aristocracy and gentry as a
group) or from which the material for our analysis may be constructed
( for example, by the methods of historical demography, or the data on
which the valuable studies of the Chinese bureaucracy have been based).
But what are we to do, say, about Indian castes, which we also know to
have contained such movements, presumably intergenerational, but
about which it is so far impossible to make even rough quantitative
statements?
( 3) More serious are the conceptual problems, which have not
always been clearly confronted by historians—a fact which does not
preclude good work ( horses can be recognized and ridden by those who
can't define them), but which suggests that we have been slow to face the
more general problems of social structure and relations and their
transformations. These in turn raise technical problems, such as those of
the possibly changing specification of the membership of a class over
time, which complicates quantitative study. It also raises the more
general problem of the multidimen-sionality of social groups. To take a
few examples, there is the well- known Marxian duality of the term
"class." In one sense it is a gen-eral phenomenon of all post-tribal
history, in another a product of modern bourgeois society; in one sense
almost an analytical con¬struct to make sense of otherwise inexplicable
phenomena, in an¬other a group of people actually seen as belonging
together in their own or some other group's consciousness, or both.
These problems of consciousness in turn raise the question of the
language of class— the changing, often overlapping, and sometimes
unrealistic ter-minologies of such contemporary classification" about
which we know as yet very little in quantitative terms. ( Here historians
might look carefully at the methods and preoccupations of social anthro-
pologists, while pursuing—as L. Girard and a Sorbonne team are doing
—the systematic quantitative study of sociopolitical vocab-ulary.")
Again, there are degrees of class. To use Theodore Shanin's

Social History to the History of Society

phrase,'5 the peasantry of Marx's 18th Brumaire is a "class of low
classness," whereas Marx's proletariat is a class of very high, per¬haps
of maximal "classness." There are the problems of the homo¬geneity or
heterogeneity of classes; or what may be much the same, of their
definition in relation to other groups and their internal divisions and
stratifications. In the most general sense, there is the problem of the
relation between classifications, necessarily static at any given time, and
the multiple and changing reality behind them.
 (4) The most serious difficulty may well be the one which leads us
directly toward the history of society as a whole. It arises from the fact
that class defines not a group of people in isolation, but a system of
relationships, both vertical and horizontal. Thus it is a relationship of
difference ( or similarity) and of distance, but also a qualitatively
different relationship of social function, of exploitation, of
dominance/subjection. Research on class must there¬fore involve the
rest of society of which it is a part. Slaveowners cannot be understood
without slaves, and without the nonslave sectors of society. It might be
argued that for the self-definition of the nineteenth-century European
middle classes the capacity to exercise power over people ( whether
through property, keeping servants, or even—via the patriarchal family
structure—wives and children ), and of not having direct power
exercised over them¬selves, was essential. Class studies are therefore,
unless confined to a deliberately restricted and partial aspect, analyses of
society. The most impressive—like Le Roy Ladurie's—therefore go far
beyond the limits of their title.
It may thus be suggested that in recent years the most direct ap-
proach to the history of society has come through the study of class in
this wider sense." Whether we believe that this reflects a correct
perception of the nature of post-tribal societies, or whether we merely
put it down to the current influence of Marxisant history, the future
prospects of this type of research appear bright.
In many ways the recent interest in the history of "mentalities" marks
an even more direct approach to central methodological prob¬lems of
social history. It has been largely stimulated by the tradi¬tional interest
in "the common people" of many who are drawn to social history. It has
dealt largely with the individually inarticulate, uncle 'umented, and
obscure, and is often indistinct from an inter¬est in their social
movements or in more general phenomena of so¬cial behavior, which
today, fortunately, also includes an interest in

those who fail to take part in such movements—for example, in the

conservative as well as in the militant or passively socialist worker.
This very fact has encouraged a specifically dynamic treatment of
culture by historians, superior to such studies as those of the "culture of
poverty" by anthropologists, though not uninfluenced by their methods
and pioneering experience. They have been not so much studies of an
aggregate of beliefs and ideas, persistent or not —though there has been
much valuable thought about these mat¬ters, for example, by Alphonse
Dupront17—as of ideas in action and, more specifically, in situations of
social tensions and crisis, as in Georges Lefebvre's Grande Peur, which
has inspired so much sub¬sequent work. The nature of sources for such
study has rarely al-lowed the historian to confine himself to simple
factual study and exposition. He has been obliged from the outset to
construct models, that is, to fit his partial and scattered data into coherent
systems, without which they would be little more than anecdotal. The
cri¬terion of such models is or ought to be that its components should fit
together and provide a guide to both the nature of collective action in
specifiable social situations and to its limits." Edward Thompson's
concept of the "moral economy" of preindustrial Eng¬land may be one
such; my own analysis of social banditry has tried to base itself on
another.
Insofar as these systems of belief and action are, or imply, im-ages of
society as a whole ( which may be, as occasion arises, images either
seeking its permanence or its transformation), and insofar as these
correspond to certain aspects of its actual reality, they bring us closer to
the core of our task. Insofar as the most suc¬cessful such analyses have
dealt with traditional or customary so¬cieties, even though sometimes
with such societies under the im¬pact of social transformation, their
scope has been more limited. For a period characterized by constant,
rapid, and fundamental change, and by a complexity which puts society
far beyond the in¬dividual's experience or even conceptual grasp, the
models deriv¬able from the history of culture have probably a
diminishing con¬tact with the social realities. They may not even any
longer be very useful in constructing the pattern of aspiration of modern
society ("what society ought to be like"). For the basic change brought
about by the Industrial Revolution in the field of social thought has been
to substitute a system of beliefs resting on unceasing progress toward
aims which can be specified only as a process, for one rest¬ing on the
assumption of permanent order, which can be described or illustrated in
terms of some concrete social model, normally drawn from the past, real
or imaginary. The cultures of the past measured their own society
against such specific models; the cul¬tures of the present can measure
them only against possibilities. Still, the history of "mentalities" has
been useful in introducing something analogous to the discipline of the
social anthropologists into history, and its usefulness is very far from
exhausted.
I think the profitability of the numerous studies of social conflict,
ranging from riots to revolutions, requires more careful assessment. Why
they should attract research today is obvious. That they al¬ways
dramatize crucial aspects of social structure because they are here
strained to the breaking point is not in doubt. Moreover, cer¬tain
important problems cannot be studied at all except in and through such
moments of eruption, which do not merely bring into the open so much
that is normally latent, but also concentrate and magnify phenomena for
the benefit of the student, while—not the least of their advantages—
normally multiplying our documentation about them. To take a simple
example: How much less would we know about the ideas of those who
normally do not express them-selves commonly or at all in writing but
for the extraordinary ex-plosion of articulateness which is so
characteristic of revolutionary periods, and to which the mountains of
pamphlets, letters, articles, and speeches, not to mention the mass of
police reports, court de-positions, and general inquiries bear witness?
How fruitful the study of the great, and above all the well-documented,
revolutions can be is shown by the historiography of the French
Revolution, which has been studied longer and more intensively perhaps
than any period of equal brevity, without visibly diminishing returns. It
has been, and still remains, an almost perfect laboratory for the
historian.19
The danger of this type of study lies in the temptation to isolate the
phenomenon of overt crisis from the wider context of a society
undergoing transformation. This danger may be particularly great when
we launch into comparative studies, especially when moved by the
desire to solve problems ( such as how to make or stop rev-olutions ),
which is not a very fruitful approach in sociology or so¬cial history.
What, say, riots have in common with one another ( for example,
"violence") may be trivial. It may even be illusory, insofar as we may be
imposing an anachronistic criterion, legal, political, or otherwise, on the
phenomena—something which historical stu¬dents of criminality are
learning to avoid. The same may or may not be true of revolutions. I am
the last person to wish to discourage an interest in such matters, since I
have spent a good deal of pro-fessional time on them. However, in
studying them we ought to define the precise purpose of our interest
clearly. If it lies in the major transformations of society, we may find,
paradoxically, that the value of our study of the revolution itself is in
inverse propor¬tion to our concentration on the brief moment of conflict.
There are things about the Russian Revolution, or about human history,
which can only be discovered by concentrating on the period from
March to November 1917 or the subsequent Civil War; but there are
other matters which cannot emerge from such a concentrated study of
brief periods of crisis, however dramatic and significant.
On the other hand, revolutions and similar subjects of study ( in-
cluding social movements) can normally be integrated into a wider field
which does not merely lend itself to, but requires, a comprehen-sive
grasp of social structure and dynamics: the short-term social
transformations experienced and labeled as such, which stretch over a
period of a few decades or generations. We are dealing not simply with
chronological chunks carved out of a continuum of growth or
development, but with relatively brief historic periods during which
society is reoriented and transformed, as the very phrase "industrial
revolution" implies. ( Such periods may of course include great political
revolutions, but cannot be chronologically delimited by them. ) The
popularity of such historically crude terms as "modernization" or
"industrialization" indicates a certain appre¬hension of such phenomena.
The difficulties of such an enterprise are enormous, which is perhaps
why there are as yet no adequate studies of the eighteenth- nineteenth
century industrial revolutions as social processes for any country, though
one or two excellent regional and local works are now available, such as
Rudolf Braun on the Zurich countryside and John Foster on early
nineteenth-century Oldham.2° It may be that a practicable approach to
such phenomena can be at present derived not only from economic
history ( which has inspired studies of in-dustrial revolution ), but from
political science. Workers in the field of the prehistory and history of
colonial liberation have naturally been forced to confront such problems,
though perhaps in an exces¬sively political perspective, and African
studies have proved par¬ticularly fruitful, though recent attempts to
extend this approach to India may be noted.21 In consequence the
political science and po¬litical sociology dealing with the modernization
of colonial societies can furnish us with some useful help.
The analytical advantage of the colonial situation ( by which I mean
that of formal colonies acquired by conquest and directly ad-ministered)
is that here an entire society or group of societies is sharply defined by
contrast with an outside force, and its various internal shifts and
changes, as well as its reactions to the uncontrol-lable and rapid impact
of this force, can be observed and analyzed as a whole. Certain forces
which in other societies are internal, or operate in a gradual and complex
interaction with internal elements of that society, can here be considered
for practical purposes and in the short run as entirely external, which is
analytically very help¬ful. ( We shall not of course overlook the
distortions of the colonial societies—for example, by the truncation of
their economy and so-cial hierarchy—which also result from
colonization, but the interest of the colonial situation does not depend on
the assumption that colonial society is a replica of noncolonial. )
There is perhaps a more specific advantage. A central preoc-cupation
of workers in this field has been nationalism and nation- building, and
here the colonial situation can provide a much closer approximation to
the general model. Though historians have hardly yet come to grips with
it, the complex of phenomena which can be called national ( ist) is
clearly crucial to the understanding of social structure and dynamics in
the industrial era, and some of the more interesting work in political
sociology has come to recognize it. The project conducted by Stein
Rokkan, Eric Allardt, and others on "Centre Formation, Nation-Building
and Cultural Diversity" pro-vides some very interesting approaches.22
The "nation," a historical invention of the past two hundred years,
whose immense practical significance today hardly needs dis-cussion,
raises several crucial questions of the history of society, for example, the
change in the scale of societies, the transformation of pluralist, indirectly
linked social systems into unitary ones with di¬rect linkages ( or the
fusion of several preexisting smaller societies into a larger social
system), the factors determining the boundaries of a social system ( such
as territorial-political), and others of equal significance. To what extent
are these boundaries objectively im-posed by the requirements of
economic development, which neces-sitate as the locus of, for example,
the nineteenth-century type industrial economy a territorial state of
minimum or maximum size in given circumstances?23 To what extent
do these requirements automatically imply not only the weakening and
destruction of earlier social structures, but also particular degrees of
simplification,
 standardization, and centralization—that is, direct and increasingly
exclusive links between "center" and "periphery" ( or rather "top" and
"bottom")? To what extent is the "nation" an attempt to fill the void left
by the dismantling of earlier community and social structures by
inventing something which could function as, or produce symbolic
substitutes for, the functioning of a consciously apprehended community
or society? ( The concept of the "nation- state" might then combine these
objective and subjective develop¬ments.)
The colonial and ex-colonial situations are not necessarily more
suitable bases for investigating this complex of questions than is
European history, but in the absence of serious work about it by the
historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, who have been
hitherto—including the Marxists—rather baffled by it, it seems likely
that recent Afro-Asian history may form the most convenient starting-
point.
V
How far has the research of recent years advanced us toward a history
of society? Let me put my cards on the table. I cannot point to any single
work which exemplifies the history of society to which we ought, I
believe, to aspire. Marc Bloch has given us in La so¬ciete Modale, a
masterly, indeed an exemplary, work on the nature of social structure,
including both the consideration of a certain type of society and of its
actual and possible variants, illuminated by the comparative method,
into the dangers and the much greater re¬wards of which I do not
propose to enter here. Marx has sketched out for us, or allows us to
sketch for ourselves, a model of the ty¬pology and the long-term
historical transformation and evolution of societies which remains
immensely powerful and almost as far ahead of its time as were the
Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldun, whose own model, based on the
interaction of different types of societies, has of course also been
fruitful, especially in pre-history, ancient, and oriental history. ( I am
thinking of the late Gordon Childe and Owen Lattimore.) Recently there
have been important ad¬vances toward the study of certain types of
society—notably those based on slavery in the Americas ( the slave-
societies of antiquity appear to be in recession) and those based on a
large body of peas¬ant cultivators. On the other hand the attempts to
translate a com¬prehensive social history into popular synthesis strike
me so far as either relatively unsuccessful or, with all their great merits,
not the least of which is stimulation, as schematic and tentative. The
history of society is still being constructed. I have in this essay tried to
suggest some of its problems, to assess some of its practice, and
incidentally to hint at certain problems which might benefit from more
concentrated exploration. But it would be wrong to conclude without
noting, and welcoming, the remarkably flourishing state of the field. It is
a good moment to be a social historian. Even those of us who never set
out to call ourselves by this name will not want to disclaim it today.

REFERENCES
1. See the remarks of A. J. C. Rueter in IX congrês international des sciences
historiques (Paris, 1950 ), I, 298.
2. R. H. Tawney, Studies in Economic History (London, 1927), pp. xxiii, 33-34, 39.
3.J. H. Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain (Cambridge, Eng.:
University Press, 1949 ), introduction.
4. Two quotations from the same document (Economic and Social Studies
Conference Board, Social Aspects of Economic Development, Istanbul, 1964) may
illustrate the divergent motivations behind this new pre-occupation. By the Turkish
president of the board: "Economic development or growth in the economically retarded
areas is one of the most important questions which confronts the world today . . . Poor
countries have made of this issue of development a high ideal. Economic development
is to them associated with political independence and a sense of sovereignty." By
Daniel Lerner: "A decade of global experience with social change and economic
development lies behind us. The decade has been fraught with efforts, in every part of
the world, to induce economic development without producing cultural chaos, to
accelerate economic growth without disrupting societal equilibrium; to promote
economic mobility without subverting political stability" ( xxiii, 1 ).
5. Sir John Hicks's complaint is characteristic: "My 'theory of history' . . . will be a
good deal nearer to the kind of thing that was attempted by Marx .. . Most of [those
who believe ideas can be used by historians to order their material, so that the general
course of history can be fitted into place] .. . would use the Marxian categories, or some
modified version of them; since there is so little in the way of an alternative version
that is available, it is not surprising that they should. It does, nevertheless, remain
extraordinary that one hundred years after Das Kapital, after a century during which
there have been enormous developments in social science, so little else should have
emerged." A Theory of Economic History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 2-3.

8. Thus Marc Ferro's sampling of the telegrams and resolutions sent to Petro-grad in
the first weeks of the February revolution of 1917 is plainly the equivalent of a
retrospective public opinion survey. One may doubt whether it would have been
thought of without the earlier development of opinion research for nonhistorical
purposes. M. Ferro, La Revolution de 1917 ( Paris: Aubier, 1987).
7. At the conference on New Trends in History, Princeton, N. J., May 1968.
 8. I do not regard such devices for inserting direction into societies as "in-
creasing complexity" as historical. They may, of course, be true.
9. P. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth ( New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1957 ), chap. 2.
10. For an English version of this important article, see Social Science Infor-
mation, 9 ( February 1970), 145-174.
11. Cf. "At stake in a broader view of urban history is the possibility of making
the societal process of urbanization central to the study of social change. Efforts should
be made to conceptualize urbanization in ways that actually represent social change."
Eric Lampard in Oscar Handlin and John Burch-ard, The Historians and the City
( Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1963 ), p. 233.
12. This work is in progress under the direction of Professor Sven-Ulric Palme at
the University of Stockholm.
13. For the possible divergences between reality and classification, see the
discussions about the complex socioracial hierarchies of colonial Latin America.
Magnus Miirner, "The History of Race Relations in Latin Amer-ica," in L. Foner and
E. D. Genovese, Slavery in the New World ( Engle-wood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall,
1969), p. 221.
14. See A. Prost, "Vocabulaire et typologie des familles politiques," Cahiers de
lexicologie, XIV ( 1969 ).
15. T. Shanin, "The Peasantry as a Political Factor," Sociological Review, 14
(1966), 17.
16. Class has long been the central preoccupation of social historians. See, for
example, A. J. C. Rueter in IX congres international des sciences historiques, I, 298-
299.
17. A. Dupront, "Problemes et methodes d'une histoire de la psychologie col-
lective," Annales: economies, societes, civilisations, 16 ( January–February 1981), 3-
11.
18. By "fitting together" I mean establishing a systematic connection between
different, and sometimes apparently unconnected, parts of the same syn-drome—for
example, the beliefs of the classic nineteenth-century liberal bourgeoisie in both
individual liberty and a patriarchal family structure.
19. We look forward to the time when the Russian Revolution will provide
historians with comparable opportunities for the twentieth century.
20. R. Braun, Industrialisierung und Volksleben ( Erlenbach-Zurich: Rentsch,
1960); Sozialer und kultureller W andel in einem liindlichen. Industriegebiet ... im 19.
und 20. Jahrhundert ( Erlenbach-Zurich: Rentsch, 1965). J. 0. Foster's thesis is being
prepared for publication.
21. Eric Stokes, who is doing this, is conscious of applying the results of work in
African history. E. Stokes, Traditional Resistance Movements and Afro- Asian
Nationalism: The Context of the 1857 Mutiny-Rebellion in India (forthcoming).
22. Centre Formation, Nation-Building and Cultural Diversity: Report on a
Symposium Organized by UNESCO ( duplicated draft, n.d. ). The sympo-sium was
held August 28–September 1, 1968.
23. Though capitalism has developed as a global system of economic interac-
tions, in fact the real units of its development have been certain territorial- political
units— British, French, German, U. S. economies—which may be due to historic
accident but also ( the question remains open) to the neces-sary role of the state in
economic development, even in the era of the purest economic liberalism.

Prosopography

LAWRENCE STONE

Origins
IN THE last forty years collective biography ( as the modern
his¬torians call it ), multiple career-line analysis ( as the social scientists
call it), or prosopography ( as the ancient historians call it) has
de¬veloped into one of the most valuable and most familiar techniques
of the research historian. Prosopographyl is the investigation of the
common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by
means of a collective study of their lives. The method employed is to
establish a universe to be studied, and then to ask a set of uni-form
questions—about birth and death, marriage and family, social origins
and inherited economic position, place of residence, educa-tion, amount
and source of personal wealth, occupation, religion, experience of office,
and so on. The various types of information about the individuals in the
universe are then juxtaposed and com-bined, and are examined for
significant variables. They are tested both for internal correlations and
for correlations with other forms of behavior or action.
Prosopography is used as a tool with which to attack two of the most
basic problems in history. The first concerns the roots of polit¬ical
action: the uncovering of the deeper interests that are thought to lie
beneath the rhetoric of politics; the analysis of the social and economic
affiliations of political groupings; the exposure of the workings of a
political machine; and the identification of those who pull the levers.
The second concerns social structure and social mobility: one set of
problems involves analysis of the role in society, and especially the
changes in that role over time, of specific ( usually elite) status groups,
holders of titles, members of professional asso-ciations, officeholders,
occupational groups, or economic classes; an-other set is concerned with
the determination of the degree of social

mobility at certain levels by a study of the family origins, social and

geographical, of recruits to a certain political status or occupational
position, the significance of that position in a career, and the effect of
holding that position upon the fortunes of the family; a third set struggles
with the correlation of intellectual or religious movements with social,
geographical, occupational, or other factors. Thus, in the eyes of its
exponents, the purpose of prosopography is to make sense of political
action, to help explain ideological or cultural change, to identify social
reality, and to describe and analyze with precision the structure of
society and the degree and the nature of the movements within it.
Invented as a tool of political history, it is now being increasingly
employed by the social historians.
The major contributors to the development of prosopography can be
divided into two fairly distinct schools. Those of the elitist school have
been concerned with small-group-dynamics, or the interaction, in terms
of family, marriage, and economic ties, of a restricted number of
individuals. The subjects of study have usually been power elites, such
as Roman or United States senators or English M.P.'s or cabinet
members, but the same process and model can be and have been applied
to revolutionary leaders as wel1.2 The technique employed is to make a
meticulously detailed investigation into the genealogy, business
interests, and political activities of the group, the relationships being
displayed by means of detailed case studies, supported to only a
secondary and rela¬tively minor degree by statistical underpinnings. The
purpose of such research is to demonstrate the cohesive strength of the
group in question, bound together by common blood, background,
educa¬tion, and economic interests, to say nothing of prejudices, ideals,
and ideology. When the main problem is political, it is argued that it is
this web of purely social and economic ties which gave the group its
unity and therefore its political force, and to a considerable extent also
its political motivation, inasmuch as politics is a matter of the ins against
the outs. This school has owed little or nothing to the social sciences,
despite the fact that it could have learned much from them, and has been
largely innocent of conscious sociological or psychological theory. Its
assumptions, however, are clearly that politics is a matter of the
interplay of small ruling elites and their clients rather than mass
movements, and that self-interest, meaning a fierce Hobbesian
competition for power and wealth and security, is what makes the world
go round.3
The second is the more statistically-minded mass school, which

deliberately draws its inspiration from the social sciences. The

members of this school have mostly, but by no means entirely, con-
cerned themselves with large numbers, about all—or indeed some-times
any—of whom in the nature of things nothing very detailed or very
intimate can be known, since they are dead and therefore unavailable for
an interview. The members of this school have a sense that history is
determined by the movements of popular opinion rather than by the
decisions of so-called "great men," or by elites, and they have been
aware that human needs cannot use¬fully be defined exclusively in
terms of power and wealth. They have necessarily been more concerned
with social history than polit¬ical history, and have therefore tried to ask
a wider, if inevitably more superficial, set of questions than those
usually posed by the members of the elitist school. They have also been
far more con¬cerned with testing the statistical correlations of the many
variables than with conveying a sense of historical reality by a series of
de¬tailed case studies. Insofar as they have tried to describe the past they
have tended to do so more by the construction of Weberian ideal-types
than by presenting a series of concrete examples. Much of their work has
been concerned with social mobility, but some of it has looked for
statistically meaningful relationships between en¬vironment and ideas,
and between ideas and political or religious behavior. The two schools
therefore differ significantly in their subjects of study, and somewhat in
their presuppositions, means, and end, but they are similar in their
common interest in the group rather than in the individual or the
institution.
Both the elitist and the mass schools first became clearly identi-fiable
in the profession in the 1920's and 1930's, when a number of works
appeared that had a profound effect on all subsequent de-velopment. The
raw materials from which these prosopographical studies were and are
constructed are mostly of three broad kinds: bare lists of names of
holders of certain offices or titles, or profes-sional or educational
qualifications; family genealogies; and full biographical dictionaries,
which are usually built up in part from the first two categories and in
part from an infinitely wider range of sources. The collection of
biographical materials of this kind had been in progress for a very long
time before the first professional prosopographers appeared on the scene.
To take the case of Eng¬lish history ( although Roman history would be
an equally good example),' throughout the late eighteenth, nineteenth,
and early twentieth centuries, diligent antiquaries, clergymen, and
scholars

had been producing biographical information of all kinds in quite

astonishing quantities. From public and private presses there poured a
flood of biographical collections of every description and every quality:
M.P.'s, peers, baronets, gentry, Archbishops of Can¬terbury, London
clergy, lords chancellor, judges, sergeants at law, army officers, Catholic
recusants, Huguenot refugees, Oxford and Cambridge alumni—the list is
almost endless.5
The purpose of this outpouring—which was matched in the United
States, Germany, and elsewhere—is not at all clear, since prosopography
as a historical method had not been invented, and these publications
were not used by professional historians except as quarries from which
to dig out chunks of information about particular individuals. In terms of
psychological motivation, these obsessive collectors of biographical
information belong to the same category of anal-erotic males as the
collectors of butterflies, postage stamps, or cigarette cards; all are by-
products of the Protestant Ethic. But part of the stimulus came from
local or institutional pride and affection, which took the form of a desire
to record the past members of a corporation, college, profession, or sect.
Part also derived from that inexhaustible passion for genealogy and
ancestor- hunting which has gripped large sections of the English upper
classes since the sixteenth century. With the huge expansion of the
educated middle class in the nineteenth century, and with the growth of
university and public libraries, there was at last a large enough market to
justify the publication of these rather esoteric and unreadable volumes.
The supreme achievement of this century-long English move-ment
for collective biography was the undertaking of the great Dictionary of
National Biography, which is an enduring monument to the drive and
dedication of the Victorians in the pursuit of infor-mation about the
individual dead. When the first historical proso-pographers got down to
work after the First World War, they there-fore found at hand a mass of
biographical information already collected and in print, and merely
waiting to be analyzed, collated, and used to construct an intelligible
picture of society and politics.
The first historian to adopt the elitist method of prosopography to
attack a major historical problem was Charles Beard, who as early as
1913 offered an explanation of the establishment of the American
Federal Constitution by a close analysis of the economic and class
interests of the Founding Fathers.5 In the key chapter, "The Eco-nomic
Interests of the Members of the Convention," he asked him-

self whether they represented "distinct groups whose economic in-

terests they understood and felt in concrete, definite forms through their
own personal experience with identical property rights, or were they
working merely under the guidance of abstract principles of political
science." His conclusion was unambiguous: "The first firm steps towards
the formation of the Constitution were taken by a small and active group
of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the
outcome of their labors," a conclu¬sion reached through an economic
biography of all those connected with its framing. This remarkable and
brilliant pioneering work seems to have had curiously little influence on
postwar develop¬ments, perhaps because of the dogmatically rigid
framework of economic determinism within which it was constructed. In
his preface of 1935 Beard attempted to deny that his attitude to
eco¬nomic determinism was all embracing, that he was deeply
influenced by Marxist thought, or that he was attributing sordid and self-
interested motives to the Founding Fathers. But his disclaimers are not
altogether convincing.? What Beard contributed to elitist prosopography
was a suspicious curiosity about the finances of a political actor and the
hypothesis that they are important. What he missed was the role of social
and kinship ties which were to bulk so large in the later studies of Sir
Lewis Namier and others. On the other hand, Beard's work should have
been familiar to Namier, who, however much he may have been repelled
by the Marxist economic determinism, must surely have been impressed
by the interpretive power of the method.
A year later another American scholar, A. P. Newton, pub¬lished a
less well-known book which carried the method a little further.8 He
carefully tracked down kinship relationships and eco¬nomic connections
in order to demonstrate the formation of the Puritan opposition
leadership to Charles I in the 1630's. His book was clearly a modest
forerunner of Namier, but for some reason, perhaps because of the rather
forbidding title, it never attracted much general attention."
The real breakthrough into general acceptance by the profession did
not come until the publication of Namier's Structure of Politics at the
Accession of George III ( London, 1929), Sir Ronald Syme's Roman
Revolution ( Oxford, 1939 ), and R. K. Merton's Science, Technology,
and Puritanism in Seventeenth Century England (Osiris, IV, 1938 ). All
three were able to draw on the store of bio-graphical information which
had been accumulated and published

over the previous century. Merton used the Dictionary of National

Biography for his work, Syme was indebted to two German his-torians,
M. Gelzer and F. Miinzer," and Namier could exploit 130 years of data-
collection about the lives of M.P's. The pioneer work of the prewar
German school of historiography was of considerable importance for the
later development of classical—and possibly also of modern—
prosopography, but its achievements have been overshadowed by the
more arresting and ambitious work of Namier and Syme. Apart from
Beard and Newton, the two latter were the first historians of outstanding
capacity to use this kind of approach to attempt a major reinterpretation
of a critical political develop¬ment which had been studied ad nauseam
by more conventional historians over a very long period. Both worked
impressionistically through case studies and personal vignettes, which
they used to build up a picture of elitist personal interests, mainly
kinship group¬ings, business affiliations, and a complicated web of
favors given and received.
The third study, by R. K. Merton, was rather different in both its
objectives and its method. As befitted an American sociologist rather
than a British historian, what he produced was a statistically based group
biography, rather than a group portrait pieced together from a series of
case studies. The problem he set himself was also different, since he was
not trying to account for specific political actions but for a state of mind,
and was explaining a mental set not by family ties or economic interests
but by ideological affilia¬tions: he was attempting to link a favorable
attitude toward natural science with allegiance to what he loosely
described as Puritanism. On the other hand, his work was similar to that
of Namier and Syme in that he was examining, although at a much
shallower depth of research, the behavior of an elite rather than a mass.
Both Syme and Namier, but particularly the latter, were to have an
enormous influence on the next generation of scholars in their fields of
specialty. Some years ago a reviewer surveyed the recent and current
work of historians of eighteenth-century British politics, and from the
problems they set themselves and the methods they used for resolving
them, concluded that they were all members of a single corporation:
"Namier, Inc."" Today both the case-study and the statistical methods—
and especially the latter—have spread to other fields and time periods,
and are being applied on an ever- widening scale to every aspect of the
historical process, at every time and in every place. The mass school
now has a flourishing

political subbranch called psephology, or the analysis of the voting

behavior of the electorate; and the elitist school has spawned a more
scientific subbranch, roll-call analysis of the legislature. Both these new
special fields are absorbing increasing amounts of time, money, and
attention from historians and political scientists."
Intellectual Roots
 That these developments occurred at the same period in the writings
of scholars working entirely independently ( Sir Ronald Syme assures
me that he had not read Namier) proves that there is more to them than
mere serendipity. Prosopography would not have flourished the way it
did in the 1920's and 1930's had it not been for a crisis in the historical
profession, which was already dis¬cernible to the more perceptive young
men of the coming genera¬tion." This crisis stemmed from the near-
exhaustion of the great tradition of Western historical scholarship
established in the nine¬teenth century. Based on a very close study of
the archives of the state, its glories had been institutional, administrative,
constitutional, and diplomatic history. But the major advances in these
areas had all been made by the race of giants of the late Victorian and
Ed¬wardian periods, the outstanding figures for English history being C.
W. Stubbs, T. F. Tout, F. W. Maitland, and S. R. Gardiner. In their
search for new and more fruitful ways to understand the work¬ing of the
institutions, some young historians just before and after the First World
War began to turn from the close textual study of political theories and
constitutional documents or the elucidation of bureaucratic machinery to
an examination of the individuals con¬cerned and the experiences to
which they had been subjected. Exasperated by the windy pieties of a
generation of historical inter¬preters of the framing of the American
Constitution, Beard intro¬duced his own book with the acid remark that
"The Constitution was of human origin, immediately at least, and it is
now discussed and applied by human beings who find themselves
engaged in cer¬tain callings, occupations, professions and interests." In
his chal¬lenging introductory statement a quarter of a century later,
Syme also declared open war upon the elder generation of historians.''
When dealing with the attitudes of Parliament toward the Ameri¬can
colonies before the Revolution, Namier did not bother himself with the
political theory of no taxation without representation. In¬stead he asked:
"What acquaintance with the American Colonies

had the house in which the Stamp Act was passed and repealed, and
in which the Townshend Duties were enacted? How many of its
Members had been to the American Colonies, had connections with
them, or had an intimate knowledge of American affairs? Were any of
them American born?"15
Following this example similar questions about who rather than what
have been asked about such diverse questions in English historiography
as Magna Carta, the House of Commons, riots, the civil service, and the
Cabinet." The unstated premise is that an understanding of who the
actors were will go far toward explaining the workings of the institution
to which they belonged, will reveal the true objectives behind the flow
of political rhetoric, and will enable us better to understand their
achievement, and more cor¬rectly to interpret the documents they
produced.
The direction in which this attack on the conventional approach to
political institutions and policies would develop was powerfully
influenced by other important trends in the intellectual climate of the
period, of which the first and most important was cultural rela¬tivism.
Greater familiarity with foreign countries through travel combined with
the growing volume of anthropological studies to re¬veal the
extraordinary range of cultural patterns that have been adopted by
different societies around the world. The educated pub¬lic became
uneasily aware that morals, laws, constitutions, religious beliefs,
political attitudes, class structures, and sexual practices dif¬fer widely
from one society to another, and this awareness in time led to a
recognition that there are few universal norms of human behavior or
social organization. The stress on environmental condi¬tioning as the
determining factor in creating this variety was all the greater because the
1920's and 1930's was a period when genetic explanations of cultural
differences were not treated with the seri¬ousness it now begins to
appear that they may possibly deserve."' Social Darwinism, which was a
powerful influence around the turn of the century, laid far more stress on
nurture than nature. More¬over, the Freudian psychologists, who soon
afterwards began to come into their own, also laid great stress upon the
role of nurture, with particular emphasis on childhood and early sexual
experience. It must be admitted, however, that Freudian psychology has
not been much use to the historian, who is usually unable to penetrate
the bedroom, the bathroom, or the nursery. If Freud is right, and if these
are the places where the action is, there is not much the his¬torian can
do about it. The subsequent modification of Freudian

ideas by Erik Erikson, according to which character formation con-

tinues through childhood and adolescence, and crystallizes in an
"identity crisis" just before maturity, opens up new possibilities for the
historian, who can sometimes discover a little about the thoughts and
feelings of his subject in adolescence, even if he knows little or nothing
about his infancy and early childhood. Up to now, however, Eriksonian
psychology has been very little used by his¬torians, and a far more
important influence upon the profession has been behaviorist theories of
challenge and response to environ¬mental pressures.
The third influential element in the intellectual climate of the age was
the decay of confidence in the integrity of politicians, and the decline of
faith in the importance of constitutions. Much of this cynicism was
generated by the political and moral disaster of the First World War,
followed by the collapse of hopes of a better world order. Many people
came to believe that this was the time when millions died and European
civilization disintegrated, while politicians jockeyed for place and power
by outbidding each other in the jingo rhetoric of hate. The result was the
penetration into in¬tellectual circles and into the upper classes of the
ancient folklore of the poor, that all politicians are crooks. This was the
muckraking era, in which the top was blown off the nineteenth century
by books like Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians ( 1918) and Mathew
Josephson's The Robber Barons (1934). Nor should it be forgotten that
the events of the period did nothing to redress the balance; it was the era
of Teapot Dome, Jimmy Thomas, and Stavisky. These popular
assumptions and actual discoveries about the moral, and in particular the
financial, laxity of politicians, led historians to think that if only one
could get access to the private papers of past poli¬tical actors, similar
motives would be revealed as a driving force in history.
Apart from Fascism ( which had little intellectual appeal ), Marxism
was the only powerful ideology of the period. Marxism gave many
historians a somewhat naive belief in economic determi-nism, which
strongly reinforced these dark suspicions about human motivation.
Beard thus declared that "the direct compelling motive" behind the
framers of the American Constitution "was the economic advantages
which the beneficiaries expected would accrue to them-selves first from
their action." 18 In its early stages, therefore, proso-pography reflected a
deeply pessimistic attitude toward human af¬fairs, and was conducted
either by radicals under Marxist influence,

like Beard, or by men like Sir Lewis Namier and Sir Ronald Syme,
who are ostensibly of a conservative frame of mind. Syme frankly
admitted of his own work that "The design has imposed a pessi-mistic
and truculent tone, to the almost complete exclusion of the gentler
emotions and the domestic virtues," while an early reviewer commented
with dismay of Namier's book that "The political system which it
describes is certainly not attractive, based as it was upon a possibly
enlightened but a certainly sordid self-interest." 19
Nor was this cynicism confined to attitudes toward individual
politicians; it also covered political systems. If revolutions mean no
more than substitution of one grasping and self-centered ruling elite for
another, if a handful of unscrupulous men steer the ship of state the way
they want, whatever the constitutional flag under which they sail, then
the difference between tyranny and democ¬racy becomes blurred, to say
the least. From this point of view the elitist school of historical
prosopographers of the 1930's was deeply affected by the contemporary
crisis of confidence in democracy. Namier deliberately set out to destroy
theories about a tyrannical conspiracy by George III against the British
constitution, and Syme appeared to remove any basis for moral
judgments about the de¬struction of the Roman republic by Augustus. In
1939 A. Momigliano applied to Syme his own description of Tacitus: "a
monarchist from perspicacious despair of human nature." 20 Robert
Dahl has rightly observed, however, that "for individuals with a strong
strain of frustrated idealism, it [elite theory] has just the right touch of
hard-boiled cynicism."21 The elite theorist and the elite historian tend to
be disappointed egalitarians, whose misanthropy springs directly from
outraged moral sentiment.
The attitude toward the workings of politics taken by the early
prosopographers appears to owe little to the writings of political
theorists. Marx himself stressed the role first of the feudal lords and then
of the bourgeoisie, and directed attention to the self-interest that guided
their actions. But the first fully-fledged elitist political theories came out
of Europe in the early twentieth century, with the writings of R. Michels,
G. Mosca, and V. Pareto. Although Michels was available in French,
Pareto and Mosca were not trans¬lated into English before the 1930's,
and there is no evidence that they had the slightest influence in historical
circles in the Anglo- Saxon world until that time. Namier, Merton, and
Syme were strongly anti-Marxist, and yet only Merton appears to have
been familiar with these non-Marxist elitist models. What we have,
there-
 fore, is the development by political scientists of a full-blown theory
of rule by elites a generation before the historians set to work. But apart
from Merton the historians carried out their empirical studies based on
their own semiconscious assumptions about political be-havior, without
the benefit of the political theory which would have provided them with
the framework they needed. It is one of the more bizarre episodes of
intellectual history, a consequence of the slowness of the great European
social scientists to be translated into English, and of the isolation of
history from the other social sciences in the early twentieth century.
A key feature of the elitist interpretation of the historical process is
the deliberate and systematic removal of both party programs and
ideological passions from the center of the political stage, and their
replacement by a complex web uniting patrons with their clients and
dependents. For Roman history, this is expressly stated by Professors L.
R. Taylor and E. Badian.22 For English history Namier substituted the
"connection" for the party as the central organizing principle of mid-
eighteenth-century politics, K. B. McFarlane invented the phrase
"Bastard Feudalism" to represent not dissimilar patron-client
relationships which he believed could explain the fifteenth century,
while Sir John Neale borrowed the word "clientage" from the classical
historians to make sense of the Elizabethan political system. In a key
passage the latter wrote, "most of the gentry seem to have grouped
themselves in close or loose re¬lationships around one or other of the
few great men of the country . . . The grouping and interdependence of
the gentry, with its ac¬companying and constant struggle for prestige
and supremacy, permeated English life. It assumed the part played by
politics in our modern society, and in the country, is the main clue to
parlia¬mentary elections." 23 For some scholars, prosopography was not
merely a way of ignoring passions and ideas, it was adopted for the
specific purpose of neutralizing these disturbing and intractable
elements.
A fourth stimulus to elitist prosopography, which in turn rein-forced
the new awareness of the essential role played in politics by associations
of dependents, was the almost obsessive concern of the anthropologists
for the family and kinship, the full impact of which is only just
beginning to make itself fully felt in the historical profes¬sion today. It
was Namier's work on mid-eighteenth-century Eng¬lish politics which
first drew the attention of historians to the po-tentialities of family
arrangements and kinship links as political

bonds.24 It is perhaps not too farfetched to see a parallel between the

preoccupation with such linkages of the elitist school of his¬torians and
similar preoccupations in contemporary fiction, notably Proust's A la
recherche du temps perdu and Antony Powell's more recent Music of
Time.
These intellectual trends are sufficient in themselves to explain the
rise of the elitist school between the wars. The more scientific¬ally-
orientated mass school obviously owed something to all of them, but
much more to the concurrent rise of the social sciences. From Weber to
Merton the most intelligent and most successful of the social scientists
have limited themselves to advancing middle-range hypotheses about
such things as suicide or bureaucracy or recep¬tivity to right-wing
political views. Historical prosopography is obviously immensely
valuable as a source of material for such in¬vestigations, and it is no
coincidence that Marx and Weber and Merton have all had strong
historical interests. The main inspira¬tion for the type of questions asked
and the methods employed to solve them by Merton and by a host of
subsequent historical in¬vestigators of the mass school was the
development of social sur¬vey techniques. From them comes the
confidence in the sampling method and the habit of asking a very wide
range of questions, many of which turn out to be wholly irrelevant, in
the hope of pick¬ing out the significant variables by statistical
manipulation later on.
Given these many converging trends in the intellectual life of the
period between the two World Wars, it is hardly surprising that it was
then that prosopography grew up. Indeed in retrospect what is surprising
is rather the slowness of its advance upon the historical stage, for it was
not until the 1950's or even the 1960's that significant numbers of
students began to use the method, and that a steady stream of useful
findings began to be published.
Limitations and Dangers
Sufficient experience has now accumulated to make it possible to
appreciate both the potentialities and the limitations of pro-
sopographical studies. Some of the errors and deficiencies are inevitable
consequences of pioneering in a new method, and can be avoided in the
future by learning from the mistakes of the past. Others, however, go
deeper, and arise from some political and psy-chological presuppositions
which are embedded in the foundations upon which prosopography rests.

Deficiencies in the Data

It is self-evident that biographical studies of substantial numbers of
persons are possible only for fairly well-documented groups, and that
prosopography is therefore severely limited by the quantity and quality
of the data accumulated about the past. In any historical group, it is
likely that almost everything will be known about some members of it,
and almost nothing at all about others; certain items will be lacking for
some, and different items will be lacking for others. If the unknowns
bulk very large, and if with the seriously incompletes they form a
substantial majority of the whole, generali¬zations based on statistical
averages become very shaky indeed, if not altogether impossible.
Studies which have to be confined to that tenth or twentieth part of the
group about which enough is known depend for their reliability on the
recorded minority being a genu¬inely random sample of the whole. But
this is an unlikely assump¬tion, since the very fact that more than usual
has been recorded about the lives and careers of a tiny minority indicates
that they were somehow atypical. To a degree which cannot be
measured, studies based on such fragmentary evidence will tend to
exaggerate, and perhaps hopelessly to distort, the status, education,
upward mobility, and so forth of the group under examination. For most
social groups in most areas prosopography cannot usefully be
em¬ployed before the explosion of record materials in the sixteenth
century, caused by the invention of the printing press, the spread of
literacy, and the growth of the bureaucratic, record-keeping nation- state.
The only exception to this generalization is when there exists a single
detailed census-type survey, such as the Florentine catasto of 1427.
These rare documents allow the historian to make a cross section
through a society at a given moment, but they cannot answer any
questions about change over time, since there is usually nothing before
or after with which to compare them. They also need to be handled with
care, since they may silently omit certain classes of persons, such as
beggars, their categories may be vague or erratic, and their financial
statistics are likely to underestimate the affluence of the rich relative to
the poor.
 The second limitation imposed by the record evidence is that of
status. At all times and in all places, the lower one goes in the social
system the poorer becomes the documentation. As a result, most studies
that have already been made or are in progress today

have been devoted to elites. The most popular subject for prosopog-
raphy has been and still is political elites, but other groups which lend
themselves most readily to such treatment are members of cer¬tain high
status categories, such as civil servants, army officers, up¬per clergy,
intellectuals and educators, lawyers, doctors, members of other
professional bodies, and industrial and commercial entrepre¬neurs. The
only elements of the lower classes about whom something can be done
in anything more than a highly impressionistic way are persecuted
minorities, since police reports and legal records often supply much of
the necessary information, especially in societies with a long tradition of
heavy bureaucratic and police control like France. The odd result is that
the only groups of poor and humble about whom we can sometimes find
out a good deal are minority groups, which are by definition exceptional
since they are in revolt against the mores and beliefs of the majority.
The third limitation imposed by the evidence arises from the fact that
it is abundant for some aspect of human life and almost nonexistent for
others. The surviving records are concerned first and foremost with the
amount, type, ownership, and transmission of property. It is this which is
the prime concern of official and private legal records, official tax
records, and public and private administra-tive records, which together
form the vast bulk of the written mater¬ial of the past. There is thus a
strong bias toward treating the indi¬vidual as homoeconomicus, and to
study him primarily in the light of his financial interests and behavior,
since this is what the records illuminate in the greatest clarity and detail.
But economic interests may conflict, and even when the interest is clear,
it is impossible to be sure that this is the overriding consideration.
Moreover the split between the compromisers and the last-ditchers is
often more im¬portant politically than the split between clearly defined
economic interest-groups.25
After economic interests, the second item of information that is
relatively easy to discover about a person is his family background and
connections. Among the upper classes marriage has been used in the past
to provide young men with useful friends and contacts, as well as to
merge properties and so create great territorial estates. Family ties have
also played an important part in the construction of political groups and
parties at all times from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century and
beyond. One has only to think of the Howards and Dudleys in sixteenth-
century England, the Villiers in the early seventeenth century, the
Pelhams in the eighteenth, and

DiEDALIJS
the Cecils and Cavendishes in the late nineteenth and early
twen¬tieth, to recognize the continuing importance of this factor. But
this does not answer the question of how far it is safe to pursue this line
of reasoning, for the cementing role of kinship clearly varies from place
to place, from time to time, and from social level to social level. There
are countless examples in history of members of the same family who
have disagreed among themselves, often with ex¬treme violence.
Moreover, even when kinship ties were strong and can be shown to have
been so, there are limits to the meaningful pursuit of genealogical links.
Two diligent prosopographers working on the Long Parliament of 1640
tracked down genealogical connec¬tions which related the radical John
Hampden to eighty fellow M.P.'s, but unfortunately these kin turned out
to be of widely vary¬ing political and religious opinions. When the
authors found that by going back far enough they could find a kinship
connection be¬tween Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, they realized that
they had perhaps passed beyond the outer limits of utility of this
particular line of inquiry. Similar doubts have been recently expressed
about the role ascribed by the prosopographical school to kinship in
clas¬sical Rome.26
Errors in the Classification of the Data
Meaningful classification is essential to the success of any study, but
unfortunately for the historian every individual plays many roles, some
of which are in conflict with others. He belongs to a civilization, to a
national culture, and to a host of subcultures— ethnic, professional,
religious, peer-group, political, social, occupa¬tional, economic, sexual,
and so on. As a result, no one classification is of universal validity, and a
perfect congruence of classifications is quite rare. Status categories may
bear little relation to wealth, and also may vary in their importance over
time. Class categories based on wealth may not reflect social realities,
may be almost impossible to identify, and may be even more impossible
to compare over time; professional categories may cut through both
status and class lines and run vertically up and down the social system;
power categories, such as political offices, may vary over time in the
social status at-tached to them, in the power they wield, and in the
income they produce.
The second danger which threatens every prosopographer is that he
may fail to identify important subdivisions, and may thus be

lumping together individuals who differ significantly from one

another.27 Good research depends on a constant interplay between the
hypothesis and the evidence, the former undergoing repeated
modification in the light of the latter. But if a subdivision which later
turns out to be of critical importance has not been noted at the time, it is
usually too late to go back and do the work all over again, a difficulty
which is particularly acute in computer-aided studies, since the code
book determines the questions that can later be asked.28
Errors in the Interpretation of the Data
Even if his documentation is adequate and his system of classi-
fication is properly designed, the unwary prosopographer is still liable to
draw erroneous conclusions from his data. One common hazard which
faces him is the possibility that that portion of the total population about
which he can discover reliable information does not represent a random
sample of the whole. If the unknowns mostly fall into a single slanted
category, the figures taken from the sample of the known will give a
distorted picture of reality. Thus Theodore Rabb himself provides reason
to think that his sam¬ple of seventeenth-century English investors is
biased, since it is quite likely that most of the unidentified 38 per cent of
investors, both named and unnamed, were petty merchants.29 This is a
prob¬lem which affects all work which used this methodology, and
against which the only defense is the most careful assessment of the
proba¬bilities, and the application where necessary of an index error to
correct the statistics. Another mistake which often occurs in
proso¬pographical studies springs from a failure to relate the findings
about the composition of the group under study to that of the
pop¬ulation at large. A good example of the difficulties into which the
historian may stumble if he neglects this point is the dispute about the
social composition of the victims of the Terror in the French Revolution.
Professor D. Greer discovered that the great majority of the victims were
drawn from the lower or middle class rather than the nobility. It has
since been pointed out that the proportion of noble victims may have
been very small, but since the proportion of nobles in the population at
large was even smaller, there is still a correlation of noble birth with
execution. One can still say that a nobleman had "X" times more chances
of being killed in the Terror than a member of the bourgeoisie or a
peasant."

Another type of error which arises from neglecting the relation-ship

between the part and the whole springs from the assumption that because
a majority of members of a certain group comes from a particular social
class or occupation, that therefore they are repre-sentative, in the sense
that a majority of members of their class or occupation belongs to the
group. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper pointed out that the men who seized
power in England in the late 1640's and early 1650's were mostly drawn
not from the old landed elite who had ruled England before the war but
from the poor gentry, mere gentry, or parish gentry, who had hitherto
played no significant part in national and only a minor role in local
affairs. Inspired by this discovery, he proceeded to generalize that the
downwardly mobile mere gentry were the principle dissatisfied elements
in the country and the main supporters of radicalism. In fact, however, it
now seems fairly clear that a far larger number of the mere gentry—
indeed the majority in the heartland of the class in the north and the west
—were loyal church-and-king men who fought for King Charles. The
Independent gentry who supported Cromwell were merely an untypical
minority, goaded into taking a position so much at variance with that of
most of their class by motives which at present we can only very dimly
perceive, but one of which was certainly religious conviction.81
Limitations of Historical Understanding
So far, the errors which have been discovered have all been ones
which can be avoided by learning the harsh lessons of experience, but
there are others which will be more difficult to eradicate. In the first
place, the concentration upon the study of elites has been part cause and
part effect of a tendency to see history exclusively as a story of the
ruling class, in which popular movements play little or no part. Syme
claimed that "In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be
it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the
facade."32 This is true enough as far as it goes, but one may reasonably
question whether it goes far enough. Close study of the political
maneuverings of the elite may conceal rather than illuminate the
profounder workings of the social process. Major changes in class
relationships, social mobility, religious opin¬ions, and moral attitudes
may be occurring among the lower strata, changes to which the elite will
eventually be obliged to respond, if it is not to be swept away in violent
revolution.33

If we look at the three most brilliant examples of prosopograph-ical

research on political elites, Syme's Roman Revolution, Namier's
Structure of Politics, and Sir John Neale's great trilogy on the Eliza-
bethan House of Commons, published in the 1950's, we can see the same
narrowing of focus. Syme interpreted the transformations of the Roman
republic into an empire as the consolidation of a new elite around
Augustus, the result of a complex factional in-fighting at the top. He
proved his point, but he ignored the urgent demands of the nameless
client masses upon their patrons which supported— and perhaps dictated
—this shift of power. Political movements, and revolutions or
counterrevolutions in particular, can hardly be satis-factorily explained
by exclusive study of the leadership. Namier's picture of wheeling and
dealing in the eighteenth-century House of Commons shattered
conventional theories beyond repair, but his explanatory model could not
include the springs of popular feeling generated by John Wilkes or the
American War of Independence. Similarly, Sir John Neale's description
of the relations between Queen Elizabeth and her Parliaments needs
modification through greater appreciation of the deep roots that
Puritanism was sinking into the society. This was an ideology which
both cut across and exploited the nexus of aristocratic clientage which
Sir John so bril¬liantly and convincingly described.
The second great intellectual weakness of prosopographers has been
their relative unwillingness to build into their perspective of history a
role for ideas, prejudices, passions, ideologies, ideals, or principles.
Intimate personal correspondence is a rarity among historical records. It
usually got destroyed during life or at death, since, unlike genealogical,
legal, or business records, nobody among the family or friends had any
incentive to preserve it. Even in the rare cases when such material exists,
it is often not very illuminat¬ing, since men rarely commit their deepest
convictions to paper, even with their friends. Moreover, since in most
periods in history it has been positively dangerous to express minority
views about religion or politics, such written comments as survive about
basic issues tend to be confined within the accepted norms of the
society. The systematic bias in the historical record in favor of material
interests and kinship ties and against ideas and principles fitted in well
with the explicitly stated presupposition of the greatest of the early elitist
scholars.• "Spiritual interests of people are considered much less than
their marriages," complained Momigliano as soon as Syme's hook
appeared. Sir Herbert Butterfield protested with ref-

erence to Namier that "human beings are the carriers of ideas, as well
as the repositories of vested interests."35
Despite some later disclaimers, there can be little doubt that in
practice both Namier and Syme attached little importance to any ideal or
prejudice which ran counter to the calculations of self- interest. The
attention paid by these historians to the tactics rather than the strategy of
politics presupposes a society without convic¬tion in which
manipulation and wire-pulling are more important than issues of
principle or policy. It so happened that the mid- eighteenth century, upon
which Namier first focused his attention, was a period in English history
unusually devoid of major issues of controversy, and a period when the
political actors formed an unusually homogeneous group: he thus chose,
by accident or design, a period and a class which were especially
susceptible to analysis by the methods he adopted. But some of his
followers have found, to their cost, that it is not always safe to carry the
same assumptions forwards and backwards in time. Robert Walcott tried
to use the. model for the reign of Queen Anne, with results that are now
gen¬erally recognized to have been little short of disastrous.36 One may
also wonder whether Oliver Cromwell's failure successfully to man¬age
his Parliaments can really be explained by his lack of tactical skill, as
Professor Trevor-Roper argues, or whether disagreement over
fundamental constitutional and religious issues between the military and
the civilians, and between Independents, Presbyterians, and Anglicans,
put a settlement quite out of reach of even the most shrewd and
assiduous manipulator of men.37 One may therefore con¬clude that the
explanatory power of the interest-group theory of politics, which has
tended to be associated with the elitist proso¬pographical approach, is
much greater at some periods and in some places than it is at and in
others. The fewer the major political issues, the lower the ideological
temperature, the more oligarchic the political organization, the more
likely it is to provide a con¬vincing historical interpretation.
Another limitation of the prosopographical school of historians is that
its members sometimes unduly neglect the stuff of politics, the
institutional framework within which the system functions, and the
narrative of how political actors shape public policy. "We are given a
story that becomes silent or curiously neglectful as it touches the very
things that government and Parliaments exist to do," com¬plained Sir
Herbert Butterfield. He concluded harshly that: "There is little interest in
the work of ministers within their departments; in

the springs of policy and the origins of important decisions; in the

actual content of the political controversies of the time; in the atti-tude of
the public to measures and men; and in the thrust and counter-thrust of
parliamentary debate . . . Such tendencies are calculated to raise the
question whether the new form of structural analysis is not capable of
producing in the practitioners of the craft its own kind of occupational
disease."38 The disease of which Sir Herbert complains is a form of
colorblindness which prevents its victims perceiving the political content
of politics.
Many elitist prosopographers instinctively opt for a .simplistic view
of human motivation, according to which the springs of action are either
one thing or another. We all of us ask our students to distinguish
religious from political motives in the foreign policies of Gustavus
Adolphus, or Oliver Cromwell, or whomever. In real life, human nature
does not seem to function this way. The individual is moved by a
convergence of constantly shifting forces, a cluster of influences such as
kinship, friendship, economic interest, class prejudice, political
principle, religious conviction, and so on, which all play their varying
parts and which can usefully be disentangled only for analytical
purposes. Moreover there is reason to think that the relative importance
of the various background characteristics will vary from culture to
culture and nation to nation and time to time; that some attitudes can be
more closely related to identifiable background characteristics than
others; and that some background characteristics are moderately
influential over a large range of at-titudes while others are highly
influential over a single attitude.39
 In any case it is essential to distinguish sharply between rela¬tively
minor matters over which a politician is ready enough to favor a relative
or client or to receive a bribe, and major issues of princi¬ple, over which
he is likely to follow the dictates of his head and his heart rather than
those of his blood or his pocketbook.
Achievements
Nothing which has so far been said should be interpreted to mean that
elitist prosopography is by its nature either useless or mis-leading. Red
flags have been put up around the main danger spots where lie the bones
of many pioneers in the method, and a case has been made for reducing
the claims of prosopography generally as an explanatory tool. If past
errors can be avoided, and if the limitations of the method are
recognized, the potentialities are very great. In-

deed, provided that it is accepted—as it surely must be—that values

and behavior patterns are strongly influenced by past experience and
upbringing, the power of the method can hardly be denied. All that is
needed is more willingness to recognize the baffling com¬plexity of
human nature, the power of ideas, and the persistent in¬fluence of
institutional structures. Prosopography does not have all the answers, but
it is ideally fitted to reveal the web of sociopsycho¬logical ties that bind
a group together. For example, to identify such ties among the leaders of
the parliamentary opposition to Charles I in the late 1630's and early
1640's does not help us to decide whether economic or constitutional or
religious issues caused the Civil War. But it does most powerfully
illuminate the process of radical party formation, and in the end makes
any such question seem redundant, for the simple reason that men do not
tear up their political institu¬tions by the roots unless all these influences
are working together to form an overwhelming incentive for change.
The best way to illustrate the full range of the contribution which
prosopography has made to historical understanding in the last twenty
years is to focus on some particular time and place, for which the
religious, social and political history of England between 1500 and 1660
will serve as well as any. The first major problem which has been
enormously enriched by these studies is the English Reformation.
Although during the 1950's and 1960's the dominant textbook interpreted
this event in primarily political terms, as an act of state carried out by a
handful of determined men at the top, there was at the same time in train
a whole series of monographs which were to shatter this simple picture.
Examination of the edu¬cational, moral, and financial condition of the
pre-Reformation clergy has shown up their many shortcomings, but has
also indi¬cated that what was happening was not so much a decline in
the quality and zeal of the clergy as a rise in the demands made upon
them by the laity.° Viewed in this light, the Reformation becomes yet
another "revolution of rising expectations." The monks have also been
studied prosopographically, with similar results, and it has been
established that there was a decline in numbers in the pre-Reforma-tion
period, and a massive voluntary flight from monastic seclusion in the
early 1530's. Monasteries and nunneries can be seen trying desperately
to adapt themselves to the needs of the upper class lay society by serving
as old age homes for pensioned retainers and servants, as hotels for
traveling gentlemen and noblemen, and as institutions for the deposit of
unwanted children.41 The fate of the

monks after the Dissolution was early subjected to prosopographical

analysis, which proved beyond doubt the fallacy of the hoary legend of
the sufferings of the dispossessed.42 The behavior of the bishops during
the Reformation crisis has been elucidated and the divisions of opinion
convincingly related to different education training—in theology or law
—and to different career lines—in the church or the state bureaucracy.°
Even more important in its historical consequences than these
valuable studies of members of the official hierarchies within the church
has been the uncovering of the roots of religious radicalism in secular
society. The great advance here came with the publication of Professor
A. G. Dickens' pioneering work on Lollards and Protes¬tants in the
Diocese of York ( 1959), which used hitherto unexplored sources, and
raised a whole range of new problems, which have since been further
worked on by students and followers. Thanks to the patient tracking of
Protestant heretics through secular and religious court records of
prosecutions, the size, influence, social composition, occupational
characteristics, and geographical spread of these persecuted minority
groups have at last begun to emerge from the shadows. No serious
scholar any longer dismisses the sur-vival of Lollardy as of no
consequence in the spread of radical religious ideas, and we can now see
the dissemination of Protestant ideas not merely through the activities of
a handful of scholars at Cambridge, but also through the penetration of
imported Lutheran pamphlets, translated Bibles, and other subversive
literature from the seaports to the inland areas via traders, cloth workers,
dissident friars, and the like.44
The subsequent religious history of England has also benefited
enormously from prosopography. The Marian exiles, who fled abroad to
escape Catholic persecution between 1553 and 1558, have been shown
to be an intellectual and social elite for which there is hardly any parallel
before the flight of the Jews from Hitlerite Germany in the 1930's, and
their role in determining the shape of the Anglican Settlement of 1558-
1559 is now recognized to have been of the greatest importance.° Our
understanding of why the Anglican church failed in its early years to win
greater acceptance and to gain more converts has been illuminated
through clerical prosopog¬raphy, which has revealed the many
shortcomings in numbers, edu¬cation, zeal, and economic independence
of the early Elizabethan parish clergy.46 On one flank of the Established
Church we are be¬ginning to have a better picture of the growth of
Puritanism through

DADALUS
greater knowledge of who the Puritans were, though much work still
remains to be done on Puritan merchants, dons, schoolmasters, clergy,
and nobles.47 On the other flank a very careful statistical and
geographical comparison of Catholics in the 1560's and Catholics in the
1580's has proved conclusively, as no other method could, that the late
Elizabethan development of Catholicism was a gentry-based revival
stimulated by the missionary activities of the seminary priests, and not a
survival of popular pre-Reformation Catholicism.48
Social history, which is concerned with groups rather than indi-
viduals, ideas, or institutions, is a field to which prosopography prob-
ably has most to contribute. Attempts to generalize about social change
in advance of either detailed local studies or global statistics based on
serious archival research lead to the kind of impasse into which the
famous "gentry controversy" got itself stuck twenty years ago, during
which rival hypotheses about broad social movements between 1540 and
1640 and their relationship to the revolution were bandied about on the
basis of craftily selected examples whose typicality was altogether
unknown. Since that time there have ap-peared several local studies of
groups of gentry, and one general study on the aristocracy, which
together go some way to eliminate certain hypotheses and to put
statistical weight behind some others."
For example, as a result of many years of very careful work upon the
gentry of Yorkshire, it has been shown that of those gentry of the
country who were in economic decline before the war and who took
sides, three quarters joined the royalists and only one quarter the
parliamentarians.50 If this is true across the country, it disproves
Professor Trevor-Roper's hypothesis that the radicals on the parlia-
mentary side represented the declining "mere gentry." The same study
also brings out the importance of Puritanism among so many
parliamentarians and of Catholicism among a significant number of
royalists. It adds one more nail to the coffin of the old Marxist the-ory,
tentatively supported by R. H. Tawney and J. E. C. Hill, that the civil
war was a conflict between capitalist entrepreneurial land¬lords and old-
fashioned rentiers. In this case, detailed prosopo¬graphical analysis has
put to the test—as nothing else could—the many theories of the social
causes of the revolution, and has begun to sift truth from falsehood
among them.51
As one might expect, the greatest concentration of prosopograph¬ical
energy has been directed toward the political elite, and in par¬ticular
toward the M.P.'s. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-

century historians had established the key role played in English

political history by the increasingly independent and powerful House of
Commons, and it had long been known that it was here that the basic
issues were fought out. But it was not until after the Second World War
that scholars began to ask what sort of people it was who made this
history. Today we have studies of the M.P.'s of almost every Parliament
between 1559 and 1660, and a much richer and more convincing picture
has emerged as a result." Through comparative statistics and a series of
detailed case studies, we can wa,tch the expansion in the numbers of
M.P.'s and trace its cause in a desire by Elizabethan magnates to extend
the range of their patronage, and in the willingness of Elizabeth to make
conces¬sions, however politically unwise in the long run, which did not
cost her money in the short run. Statistical inquiries have revealed the
striking growth in the educational training and administrative experience
of M.P.'s and the persistent rise in the proportion of gentry. We know
now how the members were elected and how elec¬toral contests were
fought and won, and we are beginning to learn a little about the changing
relationship between the electors and their representatives. We can trace
the decline in the electoral influ¬ence of the great court magnates before
1640, as it gave way to that of local gentlemen, and even of townsmen
themselves for borough seats.
Prosopographical studies of local elites outside Parliament in the
counties and the cities are just beginning to be even more helpful in
illuminating the social and economic factors behind the party line-ups in
the Civil War. They have already revealed that in some counties and
towns—but not in all—there was a withdrawal from positions of
authority in the late 1640's of members of the greater gentry and the old
urban oligarchies, and their replacement by men drawn from the lesser
gentry and small merchants, as more radical policies were adopted for
the prosecution of the war and achieve-ment of a political settlement."
The principal conclusion which emerges from this survey of the
literature is that the method works best when it is applied to easily
defined and fairly small groups over a limited period of not much more
than a hundred years, when the data is drawn from a very wide variety of
sources which complement and enrich each other, and when the study is
directed to solving a specific problem. Lol-lards and Protestants in the
early sixteenth century, Captain Swing rioters in the early nineteenth,
make ideal subjects. Ambitious sur

veys of many thousands of individuals over very long time-spans,

using only the most easily accessible printed source materials, and
applying a shotgun scatter approach to the problems which may be
answered, are far less likely to produce worthwhile results.
Conclusion
Prosopography is today in the process of coming of age. It has passed
through the follies and excesses of adolescence and is now settling down
to the humdrum routine of responsible early middle age. If the elitist
school had its origins in Germany and the United States, it was first
developed in England, both in classical and in modern history, and a
good deal of the best work still comes from there. But this early
pioneering is now being overtaken, both in quantity and quality, by the
scholarly outpourings from America. The latter has always been the
main center of the mass school, the scale of whose output and the
sophistication of whose methods is now increasing fast.54 The principal
causes of this proliferation of scientific historical prosopography in the
United States has been the great influence of sociology and political
science and the advanced training in the use of, and easy access to, the
computer. The most impressive institutional achievement of this school
has been the crea-tion of the Inter-University Consortium for Political
Research at the University of Michigan. Here there is being collected
and put into machine-readable form information about the voting
behavior, as re-corded in congressional roll calls, of every congressman
since 1789. In addition, the psephologists are being supplied with data
about popular voting at the county level in every election since 1824,
cor-related with information from the census returns since 1790 about
in-come, race, religion, and other key variables for each county and
state.55 A beginning is now being made in collecting machine-read-able
statistical data for earlier periods of American history and also for other
countries.
It is indicative of the parting of the ways between British and
American scholarship in the 1960's that the parallel monument to
prosopography on the eastern side of the Atlantic takes the rather
different form of the postwar History of Parliament project. Initiated and
planned by Sir Lewis Namier, this began in 1951 and will result in a
multi-volume biographical dictionary of all M.P.'s, linked by
introductory volumes which use this personal information to provide
illuminating case studies, to put together statistical comparisons, and

to draw political conclusions. It is characteristic of the British ap-

proach that this project is paid for by the government and not by
universities or foundations, that the biographical information it as-
sembles is not being prepared in machine-readable form ( except for one
period under the editorship of an American), and that more emphasis is
placed on the biographies and case studies than on the statistics.56
France is the third major center of historical research in the world, but
for the last thirty years the best French historians have been preoccupied
with some dazzlingly successful explorations of other new techniques of
research. They have pioneered some bril-liant environmental studies of
local societies seen as a totality and examined in great depth, they have
produced some massive statisti-cal time-series about prices, foreign
trade, and industrial output, and they have pioneered the scientific study
of historical demography. Only in the last few years have French
historians begun to take to prosopography, and in conformity with their
long-standing emphasis upon quantification they are now embarked
upon some very large- scale projects of the mass school, using the most
sophisticated com¬puter gadgetry.57 These are being supported by the
VI Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, which for
decades has been the center of statistical historical inquiry in France.
One of the reasons—although a poor and irrelevant one—why
prosopography will continue to develop on both sides of the Atlantic is
because it is so ideally suited to the requirements of research papers and
doctoral dissertations. It introduces the novice student to a very wide
range of sources, it teaches him to evaluate his evi¬dence and to apply
his judgment to resolve contradictions, it de-mands meticulous accuracy
and the arrangement of information on a methodical basis, and it offers a
topic which can readily be ex-panded or cut down by modifying the size
of the sample in order to meet the requirements of available time and
resources. Some of this research undoubtedly contributes to the New
Antiquarianism—data collection for data collection's sake—but under
skilled and organ¬ized leadership the projects can be fitted together by
the director to produce a useful contribution to the sum of historical
knowledge.
A second powerful—but equally irrelevant—reason for a further
expansion of prosopography is the arrival of the computer, the full
significance of which is only just becoming apparent. As historians
slowly and timidly began to explore the potentialities of this new
technological tool, they began to realize its almost limitless capacity

for handling just the sort of material that prosopography throws up.
The correlation of numerous variables affecting large masses of data,
assembled on a uniform basis, is precisely what the computer can do
best; it is also what is most laborious, and in many cases virtually
impossible, for even the most mathematically-minded of historians
working without. electronic aids. It is painful to admit that the advent of
a technical gadget should dictate the type of histori¬cal questions asked
and the methods used for solving them, but it would be adopting the
posture of the ostrich to pretend that this is not happening now, and will
not happen on an even greater scale in the years to come.
It must be admitted that there are some serious dangers inherent in the
very success and popularity of prosopography. The first is that the really
large undertakings, like Sir John Neale's work on Elizabethan
Parliaments, Professor W. K. Jordan's on charitable giv-ing, or Sir Lewis
Namier's even grander History of Parliament pro-ject, must be carried
out by teams of researchers, assembling data on the lines laid down by
the director. This material is then studied, collated, and eventually
published by the director, to whom alone the credit goes." Collective
research is already fully accepted by the physical scientists as a familiar
and necessary process, but it in¬volves a degree of intellectual peonage
by students and junior fac¬ulty to the professor, which many scholars
bred in the older individ¬ualistic and independent tradition of
historiography find disturbing. The second danger is that instead of
coming together, the mass and the elitist schools will specialize more
and more on their different approaches, the one becoming more
scientific and quanti¬tative and the other more impressionistic and
devoted to individual examples inadequately controlled by random
sampling. This would be a disaster for the profession, since it would
spell the end of fruit¬ful cross-fertilization. The danger has been greatly
increased by the advent of the computer, which has been embraced by
the more statistically-minded with all the undiscriminating enthusiasm of
the nymphomaniac, and rejected by the less scientific partly from
in¬tellectual prudery, and partly from complacent ignorance of what
pleasures they are missing. The availability of the computer will
increasingly tempt some historians to concentrate their energies on
problems that can be solved by quantification, problems which are
sometimes—but by no means always—the most important or
inter¬esting ones. It will also tempt them to abandon sampling
techniques, which are frequently perfectly adequate for their purposes,
and to

embark on very time-consuming statistical investigations of total

populations, which in many cases is a wholly unnecessary procedure.
Other historians may increasingly come to regard the computer as a
threat to their intellectual predominance, and may retreat still further into
the dark recesses of impressionistic methodology. To make matters
worse, there are strong national overtones to the split, since the
American and the French have far greater access to and confidence in
the computer than their English colleagues, strong cultural overtones,
with threats of a new war between the Ancients and the Moderns, the
Humanities and the Sciences, and even philo-sophical overtones, with a
clash between Fact and Fancy, Mr. Gradgrind and Sissy Jupe. As a
result, it may be a long while before there is a full meeting of minds.
Prosopography nevertheless contains within it the potentiality to help
in the re-creation of a unified field out of the loose confedera-tion of
jealously independent topics and techniques which at present constitutes
the historian's empire. It could be a means to bind together constitutional
and institutional history on the one hand and personal biography on the
other, which are the two oldest and best developed of the historian's
crafts, but which have hitherto run along more or less parallel lines. It
could combine the humane skill in historical reconstruction through
meticulous concentration on the significant detail and the particular
example, with the statistical and theoretical preoccupations of the social
scientists; it could form the missing connection between political history
and social history, which at present are all too often treated in largely
watertight com-partments, either in different monographs or in different
chapters of a single volume. It could help reconcile history to sociology
and psychology. And it could form one string among many to tie the
exciting developments in intellectual and cultural history down to the
social, economic, and political bedrock. Whether or not pro-sopography
will seize all or any of these opportunities will depend on the expertise,
sophistication, modesty, and common sense of the next generation of
historians.

REFERENCES
1. The word prosopography has a long history; its first known use is in 1743. C.
Nicolet, "Prosopographie et histoire sociale: Rome et Italie a l'epoque republicaine,"
Annales: economies, societes, civilisations, no. 3 (1970), n. 3 (I am indebted to the
editors of Annales for a sight of this article in proof). It provides a concise and accurate
term for an increasingly com¬mon historical method, and is already in standard use by
one group in the profession. It therefore seems very desirable that it should pass into
every¬day use among modern historians.
2. H. D. Lasswell and D. Lerner, World Revolutionary Elites: Studies in
Coercive Ideological Movements (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965 ).
3. D. A. Rustow, "The Study of Elites," World Politics, 18 ( 1966).
4. Nicolet, "Prosopographie et histoire sociale."
5. Joshua Wilson, Biographical Index to the Present House of Commons
(Lon¬don, 1806 ); A. Collins, The Peerage of England ( London, 1714 ); A. Collins,
The Baronetage of England (London, 1720); J. Burke, The Com¬moners of Great
Britain and Ireland (London, 1833-1838); W. F. Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of
Canterbury (London, 1860-1876 ); G. Hennessy, Repertorium Ecclesiasticum
Parochiale Londinense ( London, 1898); J. Campbell, Lives of the Lord Chancellors
( London, 1845-1847); J. Camp¬bell, Lives of the Chief Justices (London, 1849 ); E.
Foss, Biographia Juridica, A Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England . . .
1066¬1870 (London, 1870); H. W. Woolrych, Lives of Eminent Sergeants-at¬Law
(London, 1869 ); C. Dalton, English Army Lists, 1661-1714 (London, 1892-1904 ); C.
Dalton, George the First's Army, 1716-1727 (London, 1910); J. Campbell, Lives of the
Admirals (London, 1742-1744 ); J. Charnock, Biographia Navalis (London, 1794-
1798); W. Munk, Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London (1861); A. B.
Beaven, Aldermen of the City of London (London, 1908-1913); J. Gillow,
Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics, 1534-1902 (1885-1902); D. C. A.
Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France in the Reign of Louis XIV ( Edinburgh:
Huguenot Society, 1886); J. and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses ( Cambridge,
Eng., 1922-1954 ); J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses ( Oxford, 1891-1892 ).
6. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the
United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913 ).
7. Ibid. (1935), pp. 73, 324, xii-xiv.
8. A. P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans ( New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1914).
9. It was not followed up until the publication of J. H. Hexter, The Reign of King
Pym ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941).
10. M. Gelzer, Die Nobilitiit der riimischen Republik ( Leipzig-Berlin: B. G.
Teubner, 1912); F. Munzer, Riimische Adelsparteien and Adelsfamilien ( Stuttgart,
1920 ).
11. John Raymond, New Statesman (October 19, 1957 ), pp. 499-500.
12. Some examples are published in D. K. Rowney and J. Q. Graham,
Quanti¬tative History (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1969), part VI.
13. The leaders of this intellectual revolution were the French, Marc Bloch and
Lucien Febvre.

14. Beard, Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, p. xiv; R. Syme, The

Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. vii. For a description of
this historiographical sea-change in Roman history, see Nicolet, "Prosopographie et
histoire sociale," n. 4.
15. L. B. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution, 2d ed.
( London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 229.
16. J. C. Holt, The Northerners (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); J. E.
Neale, The Elizabethan House of Commons (London: Cape, 1949 ); M. F. Keeler, The
Long Parliament, 1640-1641 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1954); L.
B. Namier and J. Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754-1790 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1964 ); E. J. Hobsbawm and G. Rude, Captain Swing (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1969); G. E. Aylmer, The King's Servants: The Civil Service of
Charles I, 1625-1642 (London: Routledge and Paul, 1961); W. L. Guttsman, The
British Political Elite (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1963).
17. For a suggestive, if highly speculative, survey of the possibilities of genetic
influence see C. D. Darlington, "The Genetics of Society," Past and Present, 43 (1969).
18. Beard, Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, pp. 17-18.
 19. Syme, Roman Revolution, p. viii; D. A. Winstanley, reviewing Namier in
English Historical Review, 44 (1929), 660.
20. A. Momigliano reviewing Syme in Journal of Roman Studies, 30 ( 1940), 75.
21. As quoted in D. A. Rustow, "Study of Elites," p. 713.
22. L. R. Taylor, Party Politics in the Age of Caesar (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1949), p. 23; E. Badian, Foreign Clientelae (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1958), p. 1.
23. K. B. McFarlane, "Bastard Feudalism," Bulletin of the Institute for His-torical
Research, 21 (1945); Neale, Elizabethan House of Commons, pp. 24, 27.
24. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution, p. 19. See also
Syme, Roman Revolution, p. vii; Holt, The Northerners; Neale, Elizabethan House of
Commons; N. Annan, "The Intellectual Aristocracy," in J. H. Plumb, ed., Studies in
Social History (London: Longmans, Green, 1955 ).
25. For example, W. 0. Aydelotte, "The Country Gentlemen and the Repeal of the
Corn Laws," English Historical Review, 82 ( 1967 ); "Voting Patterns in the British
House of Commons in the 1840's," in Rowney and Graham,
Quantitative History.
26. D. Brunton and D. H. Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament
(Lon¬don: Allen and Unwin, 1954). For a convincing refutation of the theory "that
genealogical and political links would normally coincide" in the early eighteenth
century, see G. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne

(London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 327-334. C. Meier, Res Publica Amissa

(Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1966), and a review of it by P. A. Brunt in Journal of Roman
Studies, 58 (1968), 229-232.
27. For an example which has been criticized on these grounds, see L. Stone, The
Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558-1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). D. C.
Coleman, "The 'Gentry' Controversy and the Aristocracy in Crisis, 1558-1641,"
History, 51 (1966); E. L. Petersen, "The Elizabethan Aristocracy Anatomized,
Atomized and Reassessed," Scandinavian Economic History Review, 16 (1968); S. J.
Woolf, "La Transformazione dell'Aristo¬crazia et la Revoluzione Inglese," Studi
Storici ( December 1968); J. H. Hexter, "The English Aristocracy, Its Crises, and the
English Revolution, 1558-1660," Journal of British Studies, 8 (1968). The failure to
work out sufficiently detailed subcategories seriously reduced the usefulness of
Brunton and Pennington's study of the Long Parliament.
28. J.-Y. Tirat, "Problemes de methode en histoire sociale," Revue d'Histoire
Moderne et Contemporaine, 10 ( 1963), 217.
29. T. K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the
Expansion of England, 1575-1630 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni¬versity Press,
1967). For a review that makes this and other points, see J. J. McCusker in Historical
Methods Newsletter, 2 ( June 1969), 16-17. Another example of this problem is David
Pottinger's claim that the writers of Old Regime France were drawn predominantly
from the noblesse d'epee and the high bourgeoisie—a conclusion reached after the
elimination of 48.5 per cent of all writers because their social background could not be
discovered. D. Pottinger, The French Book Trade in the Ancien Regime, 1500-1791
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958). I owe this criticism to Professor
Robert Darnton.
30. D. Greer, The Incidence of the Terror During the French Revolution: A
Statistical Interpretation, 3d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964),
pp. 385-387. A slightly different example of the same fallacy is D. Lerner's attempt to
show that the Nazi leaders were "marginal men," when his definition of marginality
clearly comprised over half the popula¬tion (Rustow, "Study of Elites," p. 702).
31. H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Gentry, 1540-1640 (Economic History Review
Supplement I [1953] ); W. G. Hoskins, "The Estates of the Caroline Gentry," in W. G.
Hoskins and H. P. R. Finberg, eds., Devonshire Studies (London: Cape, 1952); J. T.
Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry (London: Athlone Press, 1969), chap. 15; A. Everitt, The
Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-1660 (Leicester: Leicester
University Press, 1966), pp. 143-144, 243-244. For another example of the same error,
see D. Donald, "Towards a Reconsideration of Abolitionists," in his Lincoln
Reconsidered ( New York: Knopf, 1956); R. A. Skotheim, "A Note on Historical
Method: David Donald's Towards a Reconsideration of Aboli¬tionists," Journal of
Southern History, 25 (1959).
32. Syme, Roman Revolution, p. 7.

33. See P. A. Brunt's remarks in Journal of Roman History, 58 (1968), 230¬231.

34. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution, p. 18; Beard,
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, p. 13.
35. Momigliano reviewing Syme in Journal of Roman Studies, 30 (1940), p. 76;
H. Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London: Collins, 1957 ), p. 211.
36. R. Walcott, English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford:
Ox¬ford University Press, 1956); J. H. Plumb, The Origins of Political Stability:
England, 1675-1725 ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967 ), pp. xiv, 44 46, 135-138;
Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, pp. 2-4, 327-334.
37. H. R. Trevor-Roper, "Oliver Cromwell and His Parliament," in his Religion,
the Reformation and Social Change ( London: Macmillan, 1967).
38. Butterfield, George III and the Historians, pp. 208-209.
39. L. J. Edinger and D. S. Searing, "Social Background in Elite Analysis: A
Methodological Enquiry," American Political Science Review, 61 (1967 ).
40. Peter Heath, The English Parish Clergy on the Eve of the Reformation
(London: Routledge and Paul, 1969), pp. 187-196; M. Bowker, The Secular Clergy in
the Diocese of Lincoln, 1495-1520 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,
1968).
41. G. A. J. Hodgett, "The Unpensioned Ex-Religious in Tudor England," Journal
of Ecclesiastical History, 13 (1962 ).
42. G. Baskerville, English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries
( London: Cape, 1937 ); Hodgett, "The Unpensioned Ex-Religious in Tudor England."
43. L. B. Smith, Tudor Prelates and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1953 ).
44. M. Aston, "Lollardy and the Reformation: Survival or Revival?" History, 49
(1964 ); J. F. Davis, "Lollard Survival and the Textile Industry in the South-East of
England," Studies in Church History, 3 (1966 ); W. Clebsch, England's Earliest
Protestants, 1520-1535 ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).
 45. C. H. Garrett, The Marian Exiles (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1938); M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1965), pp. 92-113; J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments,
1559-1581 (London: Cape, 1953), part I.
46. W. G. Hoskins, "The Leicestershire Country Parson in the Sixteenth Cen-
tury," Essays in Leicestershire History (Liverpool: University Press, 1950 ); F. W.
Brooks, "The Social Position of the Parson in the Sixteenth Cen-tury," British
Archaeological Society Journal, 3d ser., 10 ( 1948); D. M. Barrett, "The Condition of
the Parish Clergy Between the Reformation and

1660," Ph.D. diss., Oxford, 1949; P. Tyler, "The Status of the Elizabethan Parochial
Clergy," Studies in Church History, 4 ( 1957 ).
47. There is a good deal of incidental prosopographical material in P. Collinson's
great book, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement ( London: Cape, 1967). P. S. Seaver,
The Puritan Lectureships ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), chaps. 5, 6.
48. A. G. Dickens, "The First Stages of Romanist Recusancy in Yorkshire, 1580-
1590," Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 35 ( 1941). See also J. Bossy, "The Character
of Elizabethan Catholicism," Past and Present, 21 ( 1962); B. Magee, The English
Recusants ( London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1938 ).
49. For a summary of the controversy see L. Stone, Social Change and
Revolu¬tion in England, 1540-1640 ( London: Longmans, 1965 ), pp. xi-xxvi; M. E.
Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540-1640 ( Ox¬ford:
Northamptonshire Record Society, 1956); Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry; H. A. Lloyd,
The Gentry of South-West Wales, 1540-1640 ( Cardiff: University of Wales Press,
1968 ); Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy. In the last few years some twenty doctoral
theses have been or are being written on groups of gentry in various counties.
50. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry, p. 354. These percentages and the conclusions
drawn from them are mine, not Dr. Cliffe's.
51. Prosopography has also undermined another hypothesis about the causes of
the Civil War, namely H. R. Trevor-Roper's claims about the role of the bureaucracy.
G. E. Aylmer, "Office-holding as a Factor in English History, 1625-42," History, 44
( 1959 ).

52. Unpublished theses by pupils of Sir John Neale, a brilliant synthesis and
interpretation of whose findings is set out in his Elizabethan House of Commons. T. L.
Moir, The Addled Parliament of 1614 ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958); Keeler, The
Long Parliament; Brunton and Pennington, Mem¬bers of the Long Parliament; P. J.
Pinkney, "The Cromwellian Parliament of 1656," Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt, 1962; M. E.
W. Helms, "The Convention Parliament of 1660," Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr, 1963.
53. Everitt, The Community of Kent, p. 143; V. Pearl, London and the Out-break
of the Puritan Revolution ( London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 180; R. G.
Howell, Newcastle upon Tyne and the Puritan Revolution ( Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1967 ), pp. 171-173. The old elite held on in Suffolk. See A. Everitt, Suffolk and the
Great Rebellion, 1640-1660, Suffolk Record Society, 3 (1960 ).
54. Distinguished elite studies by American scholars in American history in-
clude: J. T. Main, The Upper House in Revolutionary America, 1763-1788 ( Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1967); D. J. Rothman, Politics and Power: The United
States Senate, 1869-1901 ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966); S. H.
Aronson, Status and Kinship in the Higher Civil Service ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1964 );

B. Bailyn, New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cam-bridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955); C. W. Mills, The Power Elite ( New York:
Oxford University Press, 1956); P. M. G. Harris, "The Social Origins of American
Leaders: The Demographic Foundations," Per-spectives in American History, 3 (1989),
pp. 159-348, For bibliographies of the mass school, see n. 12 above.
55. See M. Clubb, "The Inter-University Consortium for Political Research:
Progress and Prospects," Historical Methods Newsletter, 2 (1969).
56. The first abortive attempt to launch this project was in 1929, when an official
committee was set up by the House of Commons to investigate "the materials available
for a record of the personnel and politics of past mem¬bers of the House of Commons
from 1264 to 1832, and the cost of desira¬bility of their publication." The committee
reported favorably and in the 1930's Colonel Wedgwood produced two volumes on
M.P.'s between 1439 and 1509. Unfortunately he failed to publish the third volume of
synthesis and in any case his methods were so criticized that further work along these
lines was abandoned. J. C. Wedgwood, History of Parliament, Biographies of Members
of the Commons' House, 1439-1509 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1936-
1938). Review by M. McKisack in English Historical Review, 53 (1938), 503-506.
57. E. Le Roy Ladurie, N. Bernageau, and Y. Pasquet, "Le conscrit et l'ordi-
nateur: perspectives de recherches," Studi Storici, 10 (1969). Recent French studies of
elites include: F. Bluche, Les magistrats du Parlement de Paris au XVIIIe siecle (Paris:
Les Belles Lettres, 1960); A. Corvisier, L'armee francaise de la fin du XVIIe siecle au
ministere de Choiseul (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964); L. Girard, A.
Prost, R. Gossez, Les Conseillers Gengraux en 1870 (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1967).
58. See J. E. Neale, "The Biographical Approach to History," in his Essays in
Elizabethan History ( New- York: St. Martin's Press, 1958), pp. 229-234.
Research for this paper was supported by grant GS 1559X from the National
Science Foundation.